The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (13 page)

While there are differences in their claims, Brereton’s was propounded for many of the same reasons as Early’s. The claim gained currency after MacArthur’s confrontation with President Harry Truman years after the Pacific War’s last shots were fired. Truman’s removal of MacArthur from command sparked a rethinking of the general’s war record and of the events of December 8. And so, the historical tumblers clicked into place. In many historical analyses, then, MacArthur, like Longstreet, became not only insubordinate, but also incompetent. The Japanese were no longer responsible for destroying Brereton’s air force—MacArthur was. He “allowed” it to happen.

The actual historical record tells a different story. The Japanese attack on the American air force in the Philippines succeeded because Brereton had recalled his bombers for refueling and rearming and they were therefore on the ground, being refueled and rearmed, when they were attacked. Though Brereton was responsible for this situation, similar mistakes were made throughout the war, until air commanders instituted a more sophisticated system of bomber and fighter rotations—or had better luck. Brereton made a mistake and he knew it, as shown by his breathless appearance at MacArthur’s headquarters after his conversation with Arnold. While historians have focused on MacArthur, less attention has been paid to Brereton, whose record as an officer was mixed. He sought psychiatric help in the 1920s after the experimental aircraft he was flying crashed (he developed
a fear of flying—not good, presumably, for a man in his line of work). He was cited for being absent without leave when he commanded the air escort for Charles Lindbergh during the aviator’s triumphant return to the United States in 1927. Brereton received consistently poor efficiency reports and was cited repeatedly for excessive drinking. Additionally, his post–December 8 war record was dismal. The air chief had been drinking the night before the attack and had returned to his quarters only one hour before learning of Pearl Harbor.

Brereton’s less-than-stellar record does not excuse MacArthur. Although there is no historical account of MacArthur’s words to Marshall during the fateful December 8 telephone call, that MacArthur gave a blunt recitation of the facts (that the Far Eastern Air Force no longer existed) seems certain. In retrospect, the tragedy is not that MacArthur didn’t send his fighters and bombers north, to Formosa, to bomb Japanese airfields, where the U.S. forces would have almost certainly been destroyed. The tragedy is that he didn’t send them south to Mindanao—out of harm’s way. MacArthur had, in fact, anticipated the danger of a bombing attack from Formosa, writing to Marshall on November 29 that he wanted to move the bombers away from Manila and had ordered Brereton to do so. That did not happen. On the other hand, while MacArthur, Sutherland, and Brereton all followed proper procedure on the morning of the eighth (an attack was proposed, but deferred until a photo reconnaissance could be made), MacArthur was dilatory, Sutherland panicky, and Brereton irresponsible. In the end, what was important was that the Japanese victory at Clark Field was fatal to any future U.S. attempt to defend the Philippines. After December 8, MacArthur’s forces were doomed.

Amid the could-haves and should-haves of December 8, the actions of MacArthur, Sutherland, and Brereton stand out in stark contrast with the competence for which the American military became known over the next years. It is not simply that the Americans were caught on the ground; it is that their highest-ranking and most experienced officers were mentally unprepared for war. MacArthur and his staff were stunned by the sheer violence of the attack and struggled to respond to it. The Japanese did not have dozens of bombers, but had hundreds; their soldiers and pilots were not green and untrained, but were experienced and hardened;
their intelligence service did not need to conduct a reconnaissance of the Philippines, for this had already been done. Over the previous two decades, since the end of World War One, what military officers refer to as a battle’s “tempo” had shrunk: Soldiers who had once faced each other across a battlefield’s no-man’s-land, where attacks were planned meticulously and lasted for hours, now faced each other across vast distances, where targets lay beyond the horizon and where combat firefights were short, bloody, and brutal. World War One was a vicious and deadly grind, but what faced MacArthur now was of an entirely different order and would demand a competence and coordination never seen in any previous conflict. Then too, the ferocity of the attack was so stunning that a number of Brereton’s pilots were convinced that the Zeros and Bettys that plunged from the skies over Clark, Nichols, Iba, Del Carmen, and Nielson Airfields were actually flown by Germans—because everyone knew that Asians were incapable of handling complex machinery.

For his part, MacArthur defended Brereton’s reputation and so became a party to the cover-up of Brereton’s misdemeanor—a common practice of that era. MacArthur realized that as the commander in the Philippines, he was the officer responsible for the December 8 debacle, and not Brereton, no matter what the air chief’s condition. In his memoirs, MacArthur clearly defended Brereton:

    
A number of statements have been made criticizing General Brereton, the implication being that through neglect or faulty judgment he failed to take proper security measures, resulting in the destruction of part of his air force on the ground. While it is true that his tactical handling of his command, including all necessaries of its protection against air attack of his planes on the ground, was entirely in his own hands, such statements do an injustice to this officer. His fighters were in the air to protect Clark Field, but were outmaneuvered and failed to intercept the enemy. Our air force in the Philippines contained many antiquated models, and were hardly more than a token force with insufficient equipment, incomplete fields, and inadequate maintenance. The force was in the process of integration, radar defenses were not yet operative, and the personnel was raw and inexperienced. They were hopelessly outnumbered and never had a chance of winning.

In Washington, Marshall puzzled over MacArthur’s failure, but waved away the critics and ignored calls for an investigation. Was he protecting MacArthur? Or, as a postwar interview suggests, was he defending another officer’s reputation? In an interview after the war, Marshall pointedly alluded to the problems MacArthur faced on the morning of December 8. The Japanese were a problem for MacArthur, Marshall said, but so was Lewis Brereton. “It was a very trying thing for him because he had nothing he just had nothing,” Marshall said of MacArthur. “And another thing was that I found out during the course of affairs that the initial air men that we sent in were not up to standard at all.” For historians who have studied military efficiency reports of that era, “not up to standard” is well-known army code. The haunting, but unstated, truth of December 8 is that Sutherland had good reason to stop Brereton at MacArthur’s door: Brereton was in no condition to see the commander. Having plowed himself into bed after a night of revelries, Brereton was awakened five minutes later with reports of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He dressed and drove to MacArthur’s headquarters, where the air chief presented himself for duty. Sutherland, who had been at the same party, sized him up, denied him access to MacArthur, and saved the man’s career. “It had been a good party,” one of MacArthur’s aides laconically remembered.

N
ine hours before the first Japanese bombers struck America’s airfields in the Philippines, a large portion of the U.S. Pacific Fleet was at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Striking just after dawn, the Japanese sank or beached the battleships
Arizona
,
Oklahoma
,
West Virginia
,
California
, and
Nevada
and put the
Maryland
,
Tennessee
, and
Pennsylvania
out of action. The Japanese attacked in two waves using 353 aircraft and also struck Hickam, Wheeler, and Bellows Airfields. American casualties were nearly catastrophic, with 2,403 sailors, soldiers, and airmen dead.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was authored by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the son of a samurai, graduate of the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy, and one of the most admired officers in the Japanese military. Yamamoto had served on a cruiser during the Russo-Japanese War and was identified as one of the most brilliant of a rising class of young officers
educated at the Imperial Naval Staff College. Yamamoto learned English as a graduate student at Harvard University, then hitchhiked across America to learn about the country. What he saw then convinced him that once aroused, the United States would fight to the death. His views were reinforced by his service as Japan’s naval attaché in Washington, where he was exposed to the impenetrable world of American democracy.

Yamamoto was one of the great military thinkers of history, and his Pearl Harbor plan reflected his genius. Naval task forces with carrier-based aircraft, he believed, could have a decisive impact on naval battles and could fight without being seen. It was a revolutionary idea that transformed naval warfare. His plan for December 7, authored only after his argument that Japan shouldn’t fight America was overruled, was one of the most breathtaking in military history. Envisioned as an attack on the military assets of the United States, Holland, and Great Britain, the plan would erase nearly one hundred years of Western colonial power in Asia. Yamamoto’s plan was predicated on the tenuous proposition that when faced with the morale-busting loss of its Pacific fleet, the American people (the soft, spoiled, and affluent American people) wouldn’t have the stomach for a protracted and bloody conflict. They would decide not to fight and would concede East Asia to the Japanese. In light of later events—and although it was obvious to many from the outset—this calculation stands as one of the colossal blunders of modern history. It would cost Yamamoto his life, and Japanese mothers and wives millions of dead sons and husbands.

On the day that the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, six advance Japanese naval task forces sailed from Formosa and Peleliu Island (east of the Philippines) to establish forward air bases for the follow-on invasion of Luzon. The Japanese secured Batan Island, north of Luzon, at dawn on December 8; two days later, a small task force seized Camiguin Island and established a seaplane base. The seizure of Batan and Camiguin provided the Japanese with two forward outposts for what would follow—the landing of two detachments to secure airbases in the Philippines, at Vigan (on Luzon’s far northwest coast) and Aparri (in Luzon’s far northeast).

Japan landed modest detachments at Vigan and Aparri on the morning of December 10, but the landings did not go as smoothly as
the Japanese had hoped. While both towns and their nearby airfields were eventually captured, the convoys carrying the landing parties rode through heavy seas that forced the detachments to divert to calmer beaches. The landings at Aparri were difficult, with the high surf forcing the Tanaka Detachment ashore twenty miles to the east, at Gonzaga. When told the Japanese had captured Gonzaga, MacArthur ordered Brereton’s remaining aircraft aloft, with two B-17s flying north to oppose the landings. This modest air force provided MacArthur with his first victory, as one of the B-17s successfully bombed a Japanese troop transport. The pilot of the B-17, Captain Colin P. Kelly Jr., was killed on the return trip when his aircraft was shot down by Zeros. He received the Distinguished Service Cross.

The Japanese attacking force anchored off Vigan also faced rough seas. It diverted its landing party south, to Pandan, where the Kanno Detachment, some two thousand soldiers, was met by bombing runs by five U.S. B-17s, which also damaged two transports. The Japanese, who assumed that their December 8 attacks on Clark and other U.S. airfields had wiped out the American air fleet, dispatched another wave of bombers and fighters to mop up Brereton’s force. From December 10 onward, the Japanese controlled the air over Luzon.

The North Luzon commander, Jonathan Wainwright—a West Point graduate and one of the few army officers close enough to MacArthur to call him “Douglas”—viewed the Vigan and Aparri landings as diversions and sent modest columns to harass the invaders. In the meantime, he kept the bulk of his forces in central Luzon, hoping to defeat the Japanese during their landings on the beaches of Lingayen Gulf. MacArthur’s forward deployment of Wainwright’s units was a roll of the dice and a poor one, as it soon became apparent. Wainwright’s forces had little chance against the Japanese, who landed on the eastern shore of Lingayen on December 22, then followed that up with a second landing at Legaspi, in southern Luzon. A separate set of landings took place at Mindanao, where Japanese troops captured airfields to support their push into Borneo. MacArthur might have dispatched some of Thomas Hart’s ships to oppose the Japanese landings, but the Japanese bombing of Manila’s Cavite Navy Yard on December 10 had destroyed the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, despite the heroic defense mounted by Brereton’s
remaining fighters. The Japanese did not make the same mistake they had made at Pearl Harbor, where support facilities had been left untouched. This time, they bombed warehouses, machine shops, and repair facilities. Hart, whose behavior on December 7 had poisoned his relationship with MacArthur, watched the attack from his headquarters in Manila, sickened by what he saw. Billows of smoke rose over Cavite, which burned for days. The dock was covered in blood.

These were trip-hammer blows. As the Japanese followed up their early December victories, nearly all of the Southwest Pacific was in their hands (or about to be), with Japanese troops coming ashore in Malaya and Thailand. On December 10, as the first Japanese troops were fighting at Vigan and Aparri, the Japanese sank the HMS
Repulse
and
Prince of Wales
off Singapore, eliminating the British fleet in the Pacific. (“In all the war, I never received a more direct shock,” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill later wrote.) By the third week of December, the Philippine lifeline to the United States through the Central Pacific (along which, MacArthur hoped, U.S. forces would mount a counteroffensive to relieve him) had ceased to exist: American outposts on Guam and Wake Islands were bombed (Guam fell on December 8, Wake on December 23), and Tarawa and Makin, in the Gilbert Islands, were stormed. Standing on the veranda of his penthouse, MacArthur could cast his eyes onto the street below and see Filipinos rushing about—packing their meager belongings in the belief that their beloved capital would soon fall into the hands of the invader, or crowding Manila’s banks to withdraw their life savings. MacArthur was hemmed in. He now commanded an area that had shrunk to just three hundred miles in every direction. Everywhere else, at every point of the compass, the flag of the Rising Sun was triumphant.