The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (43 page)

Despite the command difficulties, neither MacArthur nor Krueger were concerned with Japan’s ability to reinforce Yamashita’s forces. During the three months of the Leyte operation, American submarines had sent more than nine hundred thousand tons of Japanese shipping to the bottom of the Pacific. By November, the Americans had so eroded Japan’s merchant capacity that submariners were running out of targets. So by December, MacArthur was confident that—though the Japanese would continue their nearly suicidal attempts to reinforce Yamashita—few of their convoys would get through. In all, the American submarine offensive of late 1944 and early 1945 crushed Japan’s last hope for a victory on Luzon. From the beginning of the war until Krueger’s men came ashore, Japanese merchant losses were fatal, with the American navy taking advantage of Japan’s poor antisubmarine tactics and weapons. This was hardly a palliative for either MacArthur or Krueger, who knew that Yamashita would fight them every day to the end of the war. Which meant that Luzon would not be another Leyte—it would be worse. Far worse.

As Walter Krueger’s soldiers were fighting for their lives on Leyte, Franklin Roosevelt began his 1944 presidential campaign by excoriating the Republicans for blaming him for the Depression. The Republicans, he said, were masters of the “big lie” that even extended, as he noted in a speech to the Teamsters Union in September, to his Scottish terrier “Fala.” Republicans claimed that Roosevelt had left Fala behind on an Alaskan island when he had visited there, then ordered a destroyer to retrieve him at the cost of millions of taxpayers’ dollars. “These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons,” he said. “No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks—but Fala
does
resent them. . . . He has not been the same dog since.” The partisan audience roared with laughter.

The scratched and aging Movietone newsreel of “the Fala speech” shows a man beset by the ravages of paralysis, bronchitis, and hypertension. Roosevelt’s eyes are hollow and fading, his hands bony, his face droopy. The president’s poor health wasn’t a secret, but the public didn’t want to hear of it, and his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, thought
better of exploiting it. “The President’s health is perfectly O.K.,” Roosevelt physician Ross McIntire told reporters. “Frankly, I wish he would put on a few pounds.” While he was battling to stay alive, Roosevelt campaigned in New York at the end of October, touring the city’s boroughs and waving to crowds from the back of an open car in the midst of a chilling rainstorm. He was fortified by shots of brandy. He then went on to Philadelphia, and on October 27, Teddy Roosevelt’s birthday—and Navy Day—he appeared before a packed house at Shibe Park.

The Shibe Park address remains a classic of campaign oratory, but it was unusual, even for Roosevelt. While he had never taken personal credit for any of the U.S. victories, Roosevelt didn’t simply want to beat Dewey, he wanted to crush him. And he wanted to torpedo allegations made by Republicans that he had kept troops from MacArthur. It all came boiling out:

    
Since Navy Day, a year ago, our armed forces—Army, Navy and Air forces—have participated in no fewer than twenty-seven different D-Days, twenty-seven different landings in force on enemy-held soil. Every one of those landings has been an incredibly complicated and hazardous undertaking, as you realize, requiring months of most careful planning, flawless coordination, and literally split-second timing in execution. I think it is a remarkable achievement that within less than five months we have been able to carry out major offensive operations in both Europe and the Philippines—thirteen thousand miles apart from each other.

But then, after a pause, Roosevelt issued a stinging jab at his critics: “And speaking of the glorious operations in the Philippines, I wonder—whatever became of the suggestion made a few weeks ago, that I had failed for political reasons to send enough forces or supplies to General MacArthur?”

R
oosevelt’s statement didn’t go unnoticed in Leyte, where the press besieged LeGrande “Pick” Diller, the SWPA commander’s public relations handler, for a comment on Roosevelt’s speech. Was it evidence of a Roosevelt-MacArthur agreement that MacArthur would remain
silent during the election campaign in exchange for Roosevelt’s approval of a Philippine invasion? Surprisingly, in a moment of candor, Diller all but conceded the point, saying that MacArthur didn’t mind that his Philippine victories were helping the president: “The elections are coming up in a few days, and the Philippines must be kept on the front pages back home.” And so they were, if only for the next week. On the morning of November 8, the nation’s newspapers were filled with reports of Roosevelt’s victory over Dewey. Roosevelt carried thirty-six of forty-eight states and 53 percent of the popular vote. Dewey responded graciously to his loss, but Roosevelt was unimpressed. “I still think he’s a son-of-a-bitch,” he told an aide. In Leyte, MacArthur shrugged. It was what he had predicted, even if he’d had more than a little something to do with it.

In truth, MacArthur had ceded the stage to Roosevelt, which was something he would have never done before meeting him in Honolulu. When invited to present celebrated fighter ace Richard Bong (who had shot down thirty-six Japanese aircraft) with the Medal of Honor, he demurred. “I’m not running for any office,” he told the press. “I don’t want the publicity.” That was only half true, of course, for MacArthur always wanted publicity: What he meant to say was that Bong—and Roosevelt—should have the headlines. Yet, with Krueger’s soldiers battling through Leyte’s maelstrom and with Japanese suicide pilots barreling through the sky overhead, MacArthur had other things to worry about. He paced the veranda of the Price House, his headquarters in Tacloban, planning how to defeat Tomoyuki Yamashita on Luzon. The planning for Luzon, dubbed Operation Musketeer, had begun even before the Leyte invasion, but it accelerated as Krueger’s Sixth Army fought up the slopes of Breakneck Ridge. Its latest version was Musketeer III (Ernie King derisively called it “the three musketeers”), and MacArthur hoped it was its last. MacArthur plied his staff with questions and paced and paced—the only time he paused was to watch as Japanese fighters whirled overhead, heading east toward Kinkaid’s navy.

In early November, MacArthur became increasingly irritated, and when supply ships piled up off Tacloban, he exploded. “Gentlemen,” he told his staff, “I have captains who can get those ships unloaded and, by God, if you don’t get the job done I am going to let them do it.” Several days later, he then engaged in an argument with Sutherland
about additional troops for Krueger, before Kinkaid arrived to complain that half of his light carriers were disabled. The admiral wanted the Luzon landings postponed until late December, he added. On November 29, Halsey cabled that his ships needed refitting. “It’s the first time the old blowhard has talked like this,” MacArthur growled. Kinkaid then returned, just before Thanksgiving, to press his earlier argument. “He marched manfully into MacArthur’s office with the report and braced himself for the reaction,” aide Paul Rogers remembered. “Kurita’s attack was probably easier to face than MacArthur’s. In this encounter MacArthur sailed around Kinkaid far more aggressively than Kurita had done, firing salvo after salvo of retribution at the reluctant admiral’s head. MacArthur paced, gesticulated, pointed an accusing finger, filled the air with oratory.” MacArthur gave Kinkaid “hell about his fear of kamikazes,” but the admiral held his ground, “leaning against a bedstead, silently absorbing the reprimand.” Kinkaid then pointed out the obvious: His men were exhausted and Krueger was mired in mud. The ships loaned from Nimitz would be sent back to Nimitz, would sail back to Luzon, and then would turn again and sail east to help Nimitz, their air crews and sailors fighting every day against an enemy hell-bent on dying. The breathless reasoning was too much, even for MacArthur. Relenting, the general placed his hands on Kinkaid’s shoulders. “But, Tommy,” he said, “I love you still.”

It was the Japanese, and not Kinkaid or Halsey, who were causing problems. Their ferocity on Leyte threw off Operation Musketeer’s schedule, as did the unrelenting typhoons. Hugh Casey’s construction crews worked around the clock, bulldozers now assigned to sweep the runways of water. It didn’t work. Pilots got into the air but died as their fighters flipped end-on-end on flooded tarmacs when they returned. In mid-November, MacArthur conceded that his forces wouldn’t be able to invade Luzon until late December, and then only after they had captured dry airfields on lightly defended Mindoro, off Luzon’s southern coast.

But the debate over the date for the Luzon landings was only beginning. The new schedule meant that MacArthur had to contend yet again with Nimitz, who had convinced King to support Spruance’s plan to seize Iwo Jima and Okinawa—and to cancel the invasion of Formosa. The Formosa decision angered King, but Nimitz insisted that a
late-December date for Luzon’s invasion simply couldn’t be met. Halsey had had to remain off Leyte for weeks longer than anticipated, and the fleet was in desperate need of rest and repairs. In the end, everything was pushed back: The landing on Mindoro was set for December 15 and on Luzon for January 9. Nimitz then pushed back his own operations: Iwo Jima was to be assaulted on February 9, and Okinawa on April 1.

For MacArthur, however, there was one more crisis to overcome. Richard Sutherland, still smarting from his Hollandia confrontation, had surreptitiously recalled his mistress from Australia, ordered a cottage built for her at the new naval base south of Tacloban, and then visited her regularly. MacArthur’s staff knew of Sutherland’s subterfuge and plotted to undo it. The job of discreetly leaking the news was given to Roger Egeberg, who, in a private lunch with MacArthur, implied that something was amiss. MacArthur took the hint: “Whatever happened to that woman?” the commander asked. “She’s at Tolosa,” Egeberg answered, referring to a nearby village. So much for discretion. MacArthur’s explosion was immediate. He ordered Egeberg to “find Sutherland,” stalked down the hallway to his office, and then (after angrily slamming his door) confronted his chief of staff. “You God-damned son of a bitch,” he roared. Sutherland was relieved of his duties and placed under house arrest, while Elaine Clarke was summarily put aboard yet another flight to Australia. Sutherland remained defiant, dispensing with his earlier blubbering. It didn’t matter. MacArthur stripped him of responsibilities and moved him to a nearby room to keep an eye on him.

While Sutherland remained on MacArthur’s staff, in the weeks ahead his place in MacArthur’s inner circle was taken by logistics chief Richard Marshall and Colonel Courtney Whitney, an unrepentant ultraconservative who had once been a lawyer for Manila’s richest families. Whitney’s influence in MacArthur’s staff would have an appalling effect, institutionalizing the insular anti-Washington paranoia among those closest to the commander. He was, as one staff officer later wrote, “a consummate flatterer” of MacArthur.

And so, for a time, it seemed that MacArthur’s luck had become bad luck. Halsey’s claim that Leyte was defenseless had proved wrong, he had left Kinkaid’s sailors vulnerable, and all of this while Japanese pilots wheeled overhead and plowed into the American fleet. MacArthur’s
headquarters became a favorite target, as if the Japanese knew he was there, as they probably did. By mid-November, its walls were pockmarked; whenever a Japanese aircraft appeared, the retinue of reporters, aides, assistants, and other staffers unceremoniously scrambled for cover.

Inevitably, however (even though the fight for Leyte seemed interminable), MacArthur’s luck began to turn. The first evidence of this came on November 26, as MacArthur stood before a room full of his commanders, giving a briefing on how best to peel apart Japan’s Leyte defenses. In the midst of his talk, a Japanese bomber strafed the headquarters, screaming as it made its final dive. Robert Eichelberger was in the room when the attack occurred and remembered the details:

    
The Japanese bombed the house, and MacArthur was standing with a pointer in his hand, as though he were a cadet pointing out places on the map. The bomb exploded, but he went on. No one in the room noticed any hesitation or any change in his hand at all. When he finished his sentence and his thought, he turned to one of his subordinates and said, “Better look in the kitchen and outside. That bomb was close, and someone may have been hurt.” At least three people in the kitchen of the house in which he was speaking were injured. One, I believe, was killed.

MacArthur’s next piece of good luck came on December 15, when the 19th and 503rd Regimental Combat Teams came ashore on the southwestern coast of Mindoro. By December 20, MacArthur’s engineers (protected by twelve thousand infantrymen) had built two dry airfields for Kenney’s fliers. But while American GIs moved inland on Mindoro, the Japanese mounted a stream of kamikaze attacks, sinking two LSTs and a tanker and damaging a light cruiser and four destroyers. The light cruiser was the USS
Nashville
, MacArthur’s command ship. But MacArthur wasn’t aboard. At the last moment, he had decided he didn’t need to oversee the Mindoro operation and sent a lieutenant colonel in his stead. The officer took up residence in what would have been MacArthur’s quarters, which is where he was when the attack came. The officer lost a leg but was fortunate not to lose his life. One hundred and thirty-three sailors were killed in the inferno.

The
Nashville
episode would have been a fitting end to a bloody year, but on December 19, as German tanks in Belgium rolled westward through the snow toward Bastogne, MacArthur was informed in a cable from Marshall that he had been promoted to general of the army—five-star rank—the day before. Marshall himself had gained that rank two days earlier, while Eisenhower was given his two days later, to be followed by Hap Arnold and Omar Bradley. The promotions extended to the navy high command, with William Leahy, Ernie King, and Chester Nimitz named fleet admirals. King’s promotion was dated one day later than MacArthur’s. The commander was undoubtedly pleased: He was now senior to King by a single day.

T
he first wave of Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army—68,000 men in four divisions abreast, lit by a shimmering midmorning sun and riding through glass-calm seas—came ashore under the guns of Kinkaid's and Halsey’s fleets on the southern beaches of Lingayen Gulf on S-Day, January 9, 1945. Krueger’s divisions (the 43rd, 6th, 37th, and 40th) pushed inland and secured the bridges over the Calmay and Dagupan Rivers. Within the next forty-eight hours, upward of an additional 150,000 troops made it ashore, nearly all without incident. This was the stuff of legend, as Filipinos talked of how they had never seen Lingayen so calm; it was as if Japan’s divine wind had been quieted by MacArthur himself. But while the waters of Lingayen Gulf were calm, the air above them wasn’t. Three days before the landings, the battleship
New Mexico
had been hit by a kamikaze attack, along with the destroyers
Walke
,
Allen M. Sumner
, and
Brooks
and the attack transport
Callaway
. The next day, the battleship
California
was targeted and suffered 200 casualties, and the
Australia
, hit during the Leyte invasion, was hit again. The roll of casualties lengthened on the day Krueger landed, with the cruiser
Columbia
suffering 92 dead, bringing the total to twenty-five ships sunk or damaged in just four days. The attacks abated as Kenney’s fighters gained control of Luzon’s skies, but the Japanese response to the invasion had been ferocious and costly. MacArthur waded ashore in the wake of Krueger’s landings and tramped around the beach, wondering where Yamashita would make his stand.