The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (46 page)

The slaughter in Manila is not mentioned in MacArthur’s postwar
Reminiscences
, though the loss of life took an emotional toll on him. At the end of February, with the fight for Manila reaching a climax, MacArthur broke down in front of his staff. He was, as Paul Rogers noted, “shattered by the holocaust.” Later, when MacArthur established his headquarters in downtown Manila and even after Jean and Arthur arrived to calm him, his mood remained dour. “This was not Manila,” Rogers later commented. “This was simply hell.” But while MacArthur searched for ways to right himself, Walter Krueger—shifting his troops back to the northeast to take on Yamashita—masked his inner turmoil by presenting an antiseptic outward calm, as did Robert Eichelberger. And although Krueger and Eichelberger continued to snipe at each other, they never forgot the brutal fight for Manila. In the end, both agreed: Yamashita should be hanged.

Seated at his desk in Washington, Ernie King read the casualty figures from Manila and shook his head. “I tried to tell them, I tried to tell them,” he muttered. “Six months ago I told them that ‘Reno’ would make a London out of Manila. MacArthur’s liberation has destroyed a city and has cost an innocent population one hundred thousand dead.” If MacArthur heard of King’s views, he refrained from countering them. The decision to fight for Manila had not been his or even Yamashita’s; it had been an orgy of death authored by the Japanese.

Then too, MacArthur had little regard for King, or anyone in Washington who might control his actions, let alone criticize them. This became all too apparent in the wake of the Manila slaughter, when the president asked playwright Robert Sherwood, a close friend, to visit MacArthur to get his views on the governance of postwar Japan. Sherwood met with MacArthur in “the awful, heartrending desolation of Manila” and was surprised by his liberal views. MacArthur told Sherwood that he thought Japan should be turned into a democracy, complete with labor unions and the ensuring of women’s rights. But MacArthur’s views on Japan were a sidelight to what Sherwood learned about the general’s views on Roosevelt—views that Sherwood found shocking and duly reported to the president in writing. “There are unmistakable evidences of
an acute persecution complex at work,” Sherwood wrote. “To hear some of the staff officers talk, one would think that the War Department, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and, possibly even the White House itself—are under domination of ‘Communists and British Imperialists.’ This strange misapprehension produces an obviously unhealthy state of mind, and also the most unfortunate public relations policy that I have seen in any theatre of war.”

The president didn’t respond, but he would not have been surprised by Sherwood’s report. Roosevelt was aware that MacArthur’s cordiality was simply the face he put on in public, while privately railing against him and his political views. Roosevelt was used to it: He had tolerated MacArthur’s ego for years when the general was chief of staff, and the president was willing to do so now, as long as MacArthur’s armies advanced. This was also true for George Marshall, who put up with the Southwest Pacific commander because MacArthur not only knew how to defeat the Japanese, but also served as a foil to King and the navy, and as a reminder to the White House that Nimitz and King weren’t the only ones fighting the Japanese.

But even Marshall’s celebrated patience could be strained, as it had been the previous September, when Eisenhower wrote to him about journalist Frazier Hunt’s adulatory MacArthur biography,
MacArthur and the War Against Japan
. Eisenhower cheekily described the book as “bedtime reading” and highlighted a number of MacArthur’s more unappetizing opinions. “You will be quite astonished to learn,” Eisenhower wrote, “that back in the Winter of 41/42, you and your assistants at the War Dept. had no real concern for the Philippines and for the forces fighting there—indeed, you will be astonished to learn lots of things that this publishes as fact.” Marshall let this go, calculating that it was an inopportune time to discipline the former army chief of staff. But Hunt wasn’t the only one whom MacArthur had spoken with about Marshall and Eisenhower. Another was Robert Eichelberger, who repeated MacArthur’s views among his colleagues. The opinions invariably made their way into the War Department, where they were repeated among the curia of senior military officers who served Marshall. That they reached Marshall’s ears cannot be proven, but it would be unusual if they hadn’t. “[MacArthur] thinks Geo. Patton will be remembered for
100 years as the man who struck a soldier,” Eichelberger said, and then added: “Said there was a crooked streak in Ike and George Catlett Marshall which would show up in a long war.”

F
ranklin Roosevelt returned to Washington from the Yalta Conference a diminished man. When he reported on his meetings with Stalin and Churchill before a joint session of Congress, he did so while seated in his wheelchair, which he had never done before. “I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say,” he said. “But I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because of the fact that I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.” He was silent for a moment, before continuing, emotionally: “It is good to be home. It has been a long journey.” He provided Congress with a blunt if optimistic picture of the war and of the structure of the international community that would follow. “This time we are not making the mistake of waiting until the end of the war to set up the machinery of peace,” he said. “This time, as we fight together to win the war finally, we work together to keep it from happening again.” His address brought a standing ovation, with his Republican opponents among those who paid him homage. “He is slipping away from us, and no earthly power can keep him here,” one of his staff assistants remarked.

Roosevelt was buoyed by Marshall’s daily reports. German soldiers were fighting block by block through their own cities, while Japanese civilians picked through the charred rubble of Tokyo, whose March bombing cost eighty-three thousand Japanese lives. Tokyo’s destruction was followed by that of Osaka, Nagoya, and Kobe. Then, suddenly, Japanese air power ceased to exist, with Arnold’s fliers in full and unopposed control of Japan’s skies.

At the end of March, Roosevelt decided that a visit to his Warm Springs, Georgia, resort home (whose warm springs helped ease the cramping in his legs) might revive his spent energies. He drove through the Georgia countryside visiting old friends and, on April 1, attended local Easter services. Eight days later, he drove to Macon, Georgia, where he picked up Lucy Mercer Rutherford, with whom he had conducted
a secret affair many years earlier, and the portrait artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff. The weather turned chilly as they drove back to Warm Springs. The next morning, he enjoyed a full breakfast, hobnobbed with reporters, and spoke to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau about the opening of the United Nations conference in San Francisco, telling him he’d be back at Hyde Park on May 1. He slept well, but awoke on the morning of April 12 complaining of a headache. That afternoon, as Shoumatoff sketched him, he went through his mail. It was at that point that he looked up before his head suddenly tilted forward. His hands went into spasms among his letters, as if he were arranging them. Daisy Suckley, a confidante, distant cousin, and sometime secretary, came quickly to help him. “Have you dropped your cigarette?” she asked. Roosevelt looked at her and grabbed the back of his neck. “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” he said. He then pitched forward, slumping in his chair. He was carried into his bedroom. Shortly after 3:30, ninety minutes after suffering an apparent stroke, he died.

Douglas MacArthur heard of Roosevelt’s death just after the conclusion of yet another fight with the navy over control of the Pacific War. But now, with MacArthur’s capture of Manila and Nimitz’s move into the islands south of Japan, MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s forces were operating nearly in the same geographic area, which meant that the decision on who would be supreme commander in the Pacific could no longer be postponed. At first, Nimitz had the upper hand because the boundary of MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area extended only a short distance north of Luzon, whereas Nimitz’s area encompassed Japan’s home islands. But despite the trouble MacArthur had caused them, neither Secretary of War Stimson nor Chief of Staff Marshall wanted MacArthur shunted aside. Moreover, the army was displeased with the way Nimitz had marginalized army General Robert Richardson in Honolulu. Despite his antinavy animus, MacArthur had acted quite differently in his command area, where he had praised Kinkaid and stroked Halsey’s ego. Even so, by rights, Nimitz should command Operation Downfall—the name given to the operation for Japan’s invasion and conquest—a viewpoint stubbornly promoted by Ernie King.

But this time it was MacArthur, in a seismic shift, who supplied the compromise. “I do not recommend a single unified command for the
Pacific,” he wrote to Marshall. “I am of the firm opinion that the Naval forces should serve under Naval Command and that the Army should serve under Army command.” He then provided a surprising concession to King. “Neither service willingly fights on a major scale under the command of the other,” he noted, adding that the navy “with almost complete Naval Command in the Pacific, has attained a degree of flexibility in the employment of resources with consequent efficiency that has far surpassed the Army. It is essential that the Navy be given complete command of all its units and that the Army be accorded similar treatment.” The JCS agreed and, six weeks before Roosevelt’s death, authored the final interservice compromise of the Pacific War, with MacArthur commanding all Pacific army units (as commander in chief, U.S. Army Forces in the Pacific) while Nimitz commanded the navy. The U.S. Army Air Force units would be under MacArthur, with the exception of the Twentieth Air Force, which would continue the strategic bombing of Japan under Hap Arnold’s control.

The historical record remains silent on whether Roosevelt pushed for this compromise, but he certainly had approved it. Despite the reports he had received on the clique of anti-Roosevelt reactionaries on MacArthur’s staff, the president had remained committed to supporting his former army chief.

In the days prior to his death, Roosevelt offered broad hints that he wanted MacArthur to be named supreme commander in the Pacific, and confirmed that he viewed the general as the great captain of Japan’s defeat. Roosevelt had said as much to George Kenney when the air commander visited with him in late March, during one of Kenney’s occasional trips to Washington. Eyes glinting, Roosevelt had listened carefully to Kenney’s briefing on the Philippine fight, then smiled at the commander, whom he would use to pass messages on to “Douglas.” Kenney later recounted what Roosevelt had told him. “As I shook hands with him to leave,” he wrote, “he thanked me for coming in, congratulated me on my job in the Pacific, and then said, ‘I suppose you would like to know whether MacArthur or Nimitz is going to run the campaign when the landing is made in Japan.’ I admitted that I was a bit curious. ‘You might tell Douglas that I expect that he will have a lot of work to do well north of the Philippines before very long.”

MacArthur received the message in early April, when Kenney briefed him on his trip. He remained suspicious. Roosevelt might be up to his old tricks, playing and replaying the delicate dance for power that had carried both of them through their careers. The general had seen it before. Supreme commander? He would believe it when he saw it, he said. What came instead was news of the president’s death. MacArthur had predicted this, back in Honolulu, but he was surprised and remained silent with reporters when asked about the news, issuing a predictable statement of regret. In private, he was much less gracious, venting his pent-up hostility at a man whom he had known and competed with his entire adult life. His treatment at the hands of Roosevelt’s New Dealers was still close to the surface: the battles of the budget, his jousting with Ickes—“General Goober of Anacostia”—and it all came out in a remark he made to his aide, Bonner Fellers. “So,” he said, “Roosevelt is dead: a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well.”

It was an astonishing, ungrateful, and small-minded statement, not least because it was Roosevelt who had saved MacArthur from Corregidor, had defended him in public, and had in the end agreed with his views on the liberation of the Philippines. Deep down, MacArthur knew this and would be forced to admit it—if only to himself. Certainly the two had had their disagreements, but in the end, they had fought on the same side, sealing an astonishing partnership that provided MacArthur with innumerable victories and helped Roosevelt win his fourth term in the White House.

On reflection, MacArthur, pushing away his bitterness, penned a quiet reflection on Roosevelt that noted the disagreements the two had had while confirming their odd friendship. “Whether his vision of economic and political freedom is within the realm of fruition,” he wrote many years later, “only future history can tell. That his means for accomplishment won him the almost idolatrous devotion of an immeasurable following is known to all. That they aroused bitterness and resentment in others is equally true. In my own case, whatever differences arose between us, it never sullied to the slightest degree the warmth of my personal feelings for him.”

George Marshall thought that Germany would surrender either in the late autumn of 1944 or certainly no later than the winter of 1945 and so began the arduous task of identifying units fighting in Europe that could be transferred to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. But Marshall was overly optimistic. As Eisenhower’s soldiers moved into northern France and bumped up against the German border in the Saar region, the Wehrmacht’s resistance turned surprisingly ferocious, forcing Marshall to rethink his prediction. He had reason for concern: German units were proving more resilient than he had anticipated, slowing Allied formations that anticipated an easy vault east toward Berlin. But this had always been a delicate balancing act for Marshall: Although more sacrifice was necessary, the public was tiring of the fighting so that, in November 1944, he had advised Henry Stimson to start providing optimistic descriptions of the European war for the public. Stimson was skeptical of the advice (“Just as soon as news of victories come, everybody wants to put on his coat and stop working,” he said), but he followed Marshall’s lead, telling reporters that the war in Europe was nearly over. “I am confident we are winning,” he told reporters soon after hearing Marshall’s advice.

This was too much even for Marshall’s staff, who thought their chief should have told Stimson to be blunt: The Allies were winning, to be sure, but the war was yet to be won. Then too, Germany’s surrender wouldn’t end the war, which had yet to be fought to a decisive conclusion in the Pacific, where tens of thousands of Americans would likely be required to give their lives. In the wake of the Battle of the Bulge, in December, General Brehon Somervell, Marshall’s brainy supply czar, sent Marshall a stinging criticism of his advice to Stimson, noting that the public was talking as if the war were all but over. “What’s a man to think otherwise?” he asked. “Listen to the highest authority in the War Department.” Such talk, Somervell pointed out, had the opposite effect that Marshall intended, leading to complacency. It was this complacency that had led to the throat-gulping surprise in the wintry forests of Belgium, which was (and there was no way around it) a
defeat
. Marshall defended himself, asking Somervell what
he
thought Stimson should have said. “You hold me responsible for production,” Somervell responded in a detailed memo to Marshall at the end of December. “Our material requirements for the E.T.O. [European Theater of Operations] have been increased since last September. I have no mandatory authority by which I can command people to produce more.” Put simply, saying “we are winning” was the one sure way to cut into industrial production, the backbone of the Allied war effort.

Somervell was right. The public was growing increasingly complacent, and Congress, reflecting this, was holding up legislation that would deepen the draft. More worrisome still was a spate of work stoppages that interfered with the U.S. war effort. The United States (as Somervell implied) wasn’t Russia, where workers could be commanded to work—and shot if they didn’t; Americans had to be convinced that their sacrifice was necessary. That was becoming more difficult. As the end of the war came in sight, workers began to leave their defense jobs to position themselves in peacetime industries. It had been easier at the war’s outset to cajole industrialists to urge their workers to greater efforts and longer hours, because the American people were desperate for victories. Now Somervell was facing increased skepticism. If the end were in sight and American victory assured, why were more tanks and bombers necessary? Recently, Somervell added in a written reply to Marshall,
fourteen hundred workers had walked off their jobs in protest over a minor work infraction. The walk-out had stopped the manufacture of crucially important ball turrets for American bombers, and it took days to end the stoppage. Somervell requested that all future press statements be written to reflect the victories that had yet to be gained, instead of recounting those already won.

Marshall got the message and relayed it to Stimson and then on to Eisenhower, with whom he had already shown surprising impatience. During a tense meeting between the two in Marseilles in late January 1945, Marshall expressed his dissatisfaction that Ike had agreed to a British request that he appoint a British officer as his deputy commander. The army chief angrily pointed out that the war was being won because of
American
, not British, sacrifices: The United States was providing three-quarters of the soldiers fighting in Europe and two-thirds of all Allied munitions. The American people wouldn’t tolerate a British officer commanding American soldiers, he said, so there would be no deputy commander—and most certainly
not
a British one. When Eisenhower then asked for more troops, Marshall brusquely turned him down. Eisenhower should clean up his army’s stragglers, the chief said, and put everyone who could hold a rifle in the line, or the general could get troops from Italy. Marshall added that Eisenhower should now conduct his operations to “employ in the front lines the fewest possible number of divisions so as to have well-rested and refitted the greatest number of divisions when the time comes for an all-out attack.”

On Luzon, as the newly minted commander in chief, MacArthur was making his own assessments. But his calculations did not take into account a shortfall of either men or equipment. Quite the opposite: After the fall of Manila, MacArthur had more than enough of both, as an avalanche of men and matériel descended on him. Robert Eichelberger was stunned by the sudden appearance of the riches and found that his men could have the pick of anything they wanted, which only emphasized just how ignored they had once been. MacArthur’s command was no longer last on the list for supplies, because there was no list: The United States was now producing enough to equip every commander with what he needed. Eichelberger could now supply three divisions with the same kinds of matériel that Eisenhower had been
getting for years. “We had never seen such wonderful gear!” Eichelberger exclaimed.

A
s it turned out, Eichelberger needed all the supplies he could get, for even as Filipino and American burial parties were combing through the ruins of Manila, MacArthur directed him to begin preparations for Operation Victor, which was designed to open a supply route through the southern Philippines. The first operation, on February 28, included a landing of the 41st Division on Palawan, where hastily constructed airfields would protect American shipping destined for Luzon. Having secured Palawan, Eichelberger conquered the rest of the central Philippines, conducting a whirlwind campaign of landings and conquests that took his Eighth Army all the way to Mindanao. Between February 28 and Roosevelt’s death in mid-April, Eichelberger’s army opened the San Bernardino Straits, conquered the Sulu Archipelago, and stormed the Visayan Islands and Zamboanga. This ambitious campaign was “a clinic in amphibious warfare,” the official U.S. Army history of the campaign reports, and it featured fourteen major and twenty-four minor beach landings in just fifty-two days. Included were landings on the Zamboanga Peninsula (on March 10), Panay (March 18), Cebu (March 26), Los Negros (March 29), Sanga-Sanga (April 2), Jolo (April 9), and Bohol (April 11). The conquest of Mindanao, the last of these Operation Victor landings, took place on April 17, five days after Roosevelt’s death. Eichelberger, out from under the shadow of Krueger, was in his element and the focus of American newspaper headlines. “I believe I do not exaggerate when I tell you that the Eighth Army is riding on the crest of the waves,” he wrote to his wife.

But Eichelberger’s offensives were not without their detractors. The JCS expressed doubts that the operations were necessary, and although they approved them, they only did so after the fact and well after Eichelberger’s troops were already ashore in the Visayans. “It is still somewhat of a mystery how and whence MacArthur derived his authority to use United States Forces to liberate one Philippine island after another,” the official U.S. Navy history of these campaigns notes. “He had no specific directive for anything subsequent to Luzon. He seems to have felt that, as Allied Theater Commander in the Southwest Pacific, he had a right to
employ the forces at his command as he thought best for the common cause.”

MacArthur’s staff defended their chief. The Japanese had slaughtered a hundred Filipinos on Palawan back in December, and there was reason to believe that the closer MacArthur came to Japan, the more vicious the Japanese would become. Then too, planning for the invasion of the central and southern Philippines had been under way since November 1944, and the plans for it had been submitted to Washington. Finally, in his last days, Roosevelt had followed MacArthur’s post-Manila operations closely and raised no objections. “There is no record of a challenge or an accusation of arbitrary usurpation of power,” a MacArthur staff aide notes. “Somewhere there had been some slippage in gears.”

But submitting a plan is not the same as having it approved, and while Eichelberger’s offensives brought no official protest from Washington, the JCS thought that MacArthur was overstepping his bounds. He was now waging a private war without the oversight that Marshall provided for Eisenhower in Europe, and this war took advantage of what had been true throughout the conflict: MacArthur conducted his operations with few men and arms and with little oversight. Worse still, with the Philippines liberated, MacArthur’s dismissive attitude toward the JCS—and the slow leaking of his private views on Roosevelt and the “anti-MacArthur clique in Washington”—began to cast a pall over his Philippine triumph. Or perhaps it was that with Roosevelt passing from the scene, MacArthur considered himself untouchable and so allowed his sense of destiny to overrule his common sense. He was MacArthur the great general, the American Genghis Khan.

Another possibility—and one certainly as likely—was that MacArthur thought he was following in his father Arthur’s footsteps. Like Arthur, Douglas resented Washington’s “interference” in his command and viewed the Philippines as a MacArthur family protectorate. This was made eminently clear when Philippine senator Manuel Roxas, who escaped Manila before being captured by the Japanese in Mindanao, was invited by MacArthur to his headquarters after the fight for the city. Roxas had ties to the Japanese puppet regime, but MacArthur seemed more than willing to overlook this, particularly as Roxas was a friend and an opponent of Quezón successor Sergio Osmeña, whom
MacArthur disliked. MacArthur defended his own hand in the rehabilitation of Roxas by saying that Roxas had secretly provided MacArthur’s headquarters “with vital intelligence of the enemy” as a part of the clandestine Manila Intelligence Group.

This claim was hardly a palliative to Osmeña, however, who was convinced that Roxas was given a clean bill of health because MacArthur wanted Roxas to run against Osmeña for the presidency. The Philippine president confronted MacArthur about Roxas, pointing out that others in the Japanese puppet administration had been arrested, including four of Roxas’s close friends. Osmeña also challenged MacArthur’s claim that Roxas had aided the Philippine resistance during the Japanese occupation, pointing out that no Filipino guerrilla leader ever remembered actually meeting with him. MacArthur airily dismissed Osmeña’s protest. “I have known General Roxas for twenty years,” the general said, “and I know personally that he is no threat to our military security.” Inevitably, Osmeña was forced to accept MacArthur’s explanation, but he knew what it meant: that Roxas would win election as president in 1946, when Osmeña’s term was up.

In fact, Osmeña quietly agreed with MacArthur’s policies on dealing with collaborators and with the views expressed by Manuel Quezón, who, before his death, had argued that members of the Japanese puppet regime in Manila should be forgiven. They’d had no choice but to obey the Japanese authorities because if they didn’t, they would have been shot, Quezón said. Osmeña came to the same conclusion. “The motives which caused the retention of the office and the conduct while in office rather than the sole fact of its opposition, ought to be the criterion upon which such persons are judged,” he argued. By this reasoning, MacArthur’s treatment of Roxas was perfectly acceptable. Or, as MacArthur put it, there would be no allegation of treason made against anyone simply because the person “accepted duties under the Japanese-established government.” What MacArthur said made sense, but it’s impossible to ignore the fact that, after the war, those who led anti-Japanese guerrilla movements were ignored, with few of them assuming postwar leadership roles. MacArthur was partly responsible for this exclusion. So was Courtney Whitney, the right-wing former lawyer and official MacArthur flatterer. As head of MacArthur’s Philippine civil
affairs teams, Whitney made sure that any leader with a leftist tinge was sidelined and disenfranchised—the list included nearly all the country’s resistance leaders.

MacArthur’s critics would later point to the Roxas case as evidence that MacArthur was playing favorites. Osmeña, they asserted, spoke for the poor and disaffected, while Roxas was pals with rich landowners. In fact, Osmeña was as much of a Manila blueblood as those who had collaborated with the Japanese. Moreover, Osmeña had little support among the Philippine people, which wasn’t true for Roxas, despite his shady past. In fact, it seems more likely that MacArthur’s support for Roxas had as much to do with the general’s disdain for Harold Ickes as it did with his disapproval of the placid and uncertain Osmeña. Ickes, still serving as secretary of the interior, not only was still sharpening his blades against MacArthur, but had also advised Osmeña that the Philippines should declare its independence only after a much longer period as an American ward. Osmeña didn’t agree with Ickes, but this hardly mattered to MacArthur, who viewed with suspicion anyone who took the interior secretary seriously. As for the status of the Philippines, MacArthur was intent that the commonwealth move toward independence as soon as possible—and Ickes be damned. If the Philippines were to be competently rebuilt, MacArthur believed, then Roxas was the man to do it. “Osmena, whatever his qualities,” a MacArthur staff assistant later noted, “was beloved in Washington only for his passivity, not for his ability to rebuild the postwar Philippines.” Except for Ickes, not only was there no official protest of MacArthur’s actions issued by Washington, but former Philippine high commissioner Paul McNutt (hardly a MacArthur partisan) endorsed MacArthur’s views, saying that what the Philippines needed now was stability, which Osmeña could not supply.