The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (36 page)

In September 1943, Roosevelt wrote to MacArthur that his wife Eleanor would be coming to Australia to tour military hospitals: “I am delighted that she will be able to see you.” But MacArthur railed at the distraction. “I don’t like that woman coming here to spy on my personal life and carry gossip back to Washington,” he told his staff. “I cannot have her here.” He fobbed her off on Bob Eichelberger and then onto his wife Jean, who hosted a luncheon for her in Brisbane. MacArthur’s discourtesy was self-defeating—he came off as narrow-minded and boorish. He defended himself by saying that he was “at the front” and that her visit to Port Moresby would be “too dangerous.” The president remained silent: game, set, match.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to Australia looms large in the Roosevelt-MacArthur narrative, primarily because MacArthur was being mentioned in Republican circles as a candidate for president in the next year’s election. He had met with visiting Republican senators and Washington VIPs in Port Moresby throughout 1943 (remarkably, it wasn’t “too dangerous” for them to be near the front) and maintained a lively correspondence with Republican funders. Sitting in the Oval Office, Franklin Roosevelt neither underestimated MacArthur nor dismissed
the general’s candidacy. He wasn’t taking any chances, so, as 1943 waned, the president directed his staff to gather the statements his Southwest Pacific commander had made before Pearl Harbor, when MacArthur had said the Japanese wouldn’t dare attack the Philippines. MacArthur certainly knew he was vulnerable politically, but with Rabaul no longer an objective, his eyes were set more firmly on the Philippines than on the White House.

MacArthur’s lack of presidential aspirations was confirmed in the aftermath of Kenney’s second visit to Washington in January 1944. Upon his return, he met with MacArthur to review his meetings. Kenney didn’t think MacArthur had much of a chance at Roosevelt’s job, but couldn’t find a way to introduce the subject. The air chief told MacArthur that he looked forward to the day when Kenney could ride with him through the streets of Tokyo instead of “wondering what had happened to the man who lost to Roosevelt in 1944.” MacArthur laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I have no desire to get mixed up in politics. The first mission that I want to carry out is to liberate the Philippines and fulfill America’s pledge to that people.”

Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to MacArthur’s theater was important for political reasons, but it pales in comparison to George Marshall’s visit to MacArthur three months later, in December 1943. In the wake of Allied conferences in Cairo and Tehran, Marshall had decided he needed to see for himself what MacArthur was doing in Port Moresby. He flew from Egypt via Ceylon and arrived in Australia on December 15. He had been at Roosevelt’s side nearly every minute of the president’s meetings with Churchill and Stalin, but was disappointed at not being named commander of the invasion of France. Roosevelt had appointed Dwight Eisenhower in his stead, telling Marshall, “I didn’t feel I could sleep at ease if you were out of Washington.” Marshall didn’t look forward to the visit with MacArthur. His relationship with the Southwest Pacific commander remained cool, despite a certain growing respect between the two since December 7, 1941: MacArthur never publicly criticized Marshall, and Marshall consistently defended the former army chief from his detractors.

Marshall arrived in Brisbane after a dangerous flight that took him over 3,136 miles of Japanese-held territory. After landing in Brisbane,
he was flown to Goodenough Island, just north of the eastern tip of Papua New Guinea, where MacArthur was overseeing Walter Krueger’s operations against Cape Gloucester. Elements of Krueger’s Alamo Force had just landed on Arawe, and Krueger briefed Marshall on the operation. Marshall then gave MacArthur and his staff a detailed account of the European war and the Cairo and Tehran meetings. The next morning, in a downpour, Marshall accompanied Krueger on an inspection of American troops, then flew with MacArthur back to Port Moresby, where he was given a summary of the last stages of Operation Cartwheel. There was one off-tune note during MacArthur’s presentation, when Rear Admiral Charles Cooke (sent by Ernie King to report every word that was said) interrupted MacArthur’s briefing to point out that the main effort against Japan would come in the Central Pacific. George Kenney just as pointedly disagreed, saying there were two offensives in the Pacific, and not just one. Marshall glared at Cooke and agreed with Kenney.

The MacArthur-Marshall exchange was friendly, if blunt. MacArthur blamed the navy for his lack of resources, said that King resented him, and complained that Kenney needed more aircraft. Marshall was impatient with this laundry list of complaints, so when MacArthur praised his staff, the army chief interrupted him: “You don’t have a staff, General, you have a court.” We don’t know MacArthur’s response, but Marshall’s offhand comment must have irritated the commander. During one of MacArthur’s outbursts against King, Marshall again showed his frustration, pointing out that MacArthur’s constant “navaphobia” was counterproductive. But Marshall agreed that King was the reason that MacArthur couldn’t get what he wanted, adding that while he “regretted” the “imbalance,” he couldn’t do much about it. “We had a long and frank discussion,” MacArthur later wrote, and he left it at that. “I didn’t see any evidence of any conflict between Marshall and MacArthur,” Marshall’s deputy Thomas Handy later remarked. “I figured it this way: MacArthur had been Chief of Staff of the Army, and he wasn’t going to degrade that position. In other words, his talk and attitude toward General Marshall, regardless of what his personal feelings might have been, were quite proper. . . . Marshall now had the office, and I think General MacArthur respected that.”

When Marshall returned to Washington, he fired off a note praising MacArthur for the “admirable organization and fighting force you have under development there” and told him that more supplies would be coming his way. Within two months, three new bombardment groups would be dispatched to Brisbane, along with the 1st Cavalry Division. Then the spigots opened: The 1st Cav was supplemented by the arrival of the 6th, 28th, 31st, 40th, and 43rd Infantry Divisions. Toward the end of 1944, additional support arrived with the dispatch of the 38th, 81st, and 96th Divisions, the 11th Airborne Division; and the “Americal” Division, which had fought on Guadalcanal. By mid-1944, MacArthur would have enough fighting men to build two armies and enough divisions to invade the Philippines. MacArthur not only was buoyed by Marshall’s visit, but was now convinced that he had an ally in Washington. “Your trip here was an inspiration to all ranks and its effects were immediate,” MacArthur wrote him. “You have no more loyal and faithful followers than here.”

The exchange of notes was to be expected, for Marshall was a pillar of military courtesy. But Marshall was also impressed by the astonishing amount of construction he observed in MacArthur’s command: new docks, barracks, airfields, warehouses, aerodromes, depots—and construction battalions building more. Port Moresby’s harbor was filled with transports, and Brisbane with American troops. Morale among MacArthur’s men was good, and his senior commanders—the triumvirate of Krueger, Kenney, and Kinkaid (“my three ‘K’s,’” as MacArthur called them), as well as Daniel Barbey and Robert Eichelberger—numbered among the best combat officers in the American military. This was a relief for Marshall and Roosevelt, who summarized Marshall’s views in a Christmas Eve fireside chat: What MacArthur had in store, he told the American people, would spell “plenty of bad news for the Japs in the not too far distant future.”

O
n February 21, 1944, a group of pilots told General Ennis “Whitey” Whitehead (“the Murderer of Moresby,” as the Japanese dubbed him) that they had spent two days over the Admiralty Islands without seeing a single enemy fighter. Whitehead, a MacArthur favorite, flew to Brisbane to report the information to Kenney.
Los Negros, the third-largest island of the Admiralties, he said, “is ripe for the plucking.” Early on the morning of February 24, Kenney rushed into MacArthur’s office with the news. Capturing Momote Airfield at Los Negros, Kenney said, would outflank Rabaul from the north. MacArthur, who had been pacing, whirled on Kenney. “That will put the cork in the bottle,” he proclaimed. MacArthur ordered that a task force of fifteen hundred soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division land on Los Negros’s southern coast at the end of the month, just days away. While the army’s official history later praised MacArthur for his “self-confidence,” the Los Negros landings might have been a second Tarawa. For while Kenney was convinced that the Japanese had abandoned Los Negros, Charles Willoughby wasn’t: There were over four thousand Japanese soldiers on the island, he said, lying in wait.

Willoughby was right, and Kenney wrong—the Japanese were on Los Negros; they just couldn’t be seen. Their commander, Colonel Yoshio Ezaki, had given them orders to remain hidden along the island’s northern coast, where he thought the Americans would land. Willoughby frantically attempted to sidetrack the operation, telling MacArthur it wasn’t possible to plan a landing in just four days. But MacArthur brushed aside the warnings and peremptorily announced that he would oversee the landings as a guest aboard the USS
Phoenix
, Thomas Kinkaid’s command ship. Krueger confronted MacArthur, telling him that a commander’s place was in the rear, adding that a detachment of Alamo Scouts had gone onto the island and reported that it was “lousy with Japs.” MacArthur remained undeterred—the landings would go forward as planned, and he would be there to watch. Krueger thought about this and decided that MacArthur’s stubbornness was not a sign of his confidence, but of his insecurity: If the Japanese attacked, he wanted to be on hand to decide whether to “continue the assault or withdraw.” Then too, MacArthur wanted to see for himself how Kinkaid performed, and Los Negros gave him that opportunity.

For Kinkaid, working diligently to satisfy both MacArthur and King, the challenges he had faced in the three months since taking command of the Seventh Fleet proved difficult to overcome. He had pushed himself on MacArthur, contended with the sullen Krueger, and barely tolerated Kenney, who described the navy as “the god-damned Navy.”
Astonished that MacArthur, Krueger, and Kenney had little idea of what he actually did, he set out to educate them. His ships weren’t merely transports, he told them, they killed Japanese; his sailors weren’t chauffeurs, they were fighters. Now, with MacArthur being piped aboard the
Phoenix
at Oro Bay (east of Buna on New Guinea’s coast), Kinkaid squired MacArthur through the ship, introduced him to his crew, and settled him in quarters that were purposely claustrophobic. When the
Phoenix
arrived off Los Negros, Kinkaid put MacArthur on the bridge, then watched him closely as the cruiser’s guns opened fire. Feeling the power of a ship like the
Phoenix
, Kinkaid knew, was awe-inspiring. As Kinkaid had planned and hoped, the Los Negros operation was MacArthur’s Damascus moment. MacArthur nodded approvingly when the
Phoenix
pumped shell after shell from its 150-mm guns onto Japanese positions, then nodded again when the nearby
Mahan
opened fire. From that moment on, Kinkaid reported, MacArthur “became more royalist than the king.”

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.”

D
espite 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.