The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (47 page)

There are many reasons to question MacArthur’s views on Philippine collaboration, but the post-occupation history of the archipelago follows a distinctly different trajectory than that followed by most German-occupied European countries—or China, where collaborators were treated harshly. This was not the case in the Philippines, where many of the richest and most powerful families survived the occupation by cooperating with their occupiers. Eventually, about five thousand Filipinos were identified as collaborators and brought to trial by special courts,
but only 156 of those trials resulted in a conviction. Not surprisingly, Ickes took note of the MacArthur policy and intervened against him, writing to Osmeña that if the Philippines did not “diligently and firmly” prosecute collaborators, the United States would withhold postwar reconstruction aid. As MacArthur anticipated, the always ham-handed Ickes had blundered: After news of his threat appeared in the Philippine press, Osmeña was viewed as being a tool of “the imperialist Americans,” while Roxas was seen as “a patriotic nationalist.”

T
he imbroglio over Roxas was only one of several crises that MacArthur faced in the wake of his Luzon triumph. In February, MacArthur had told Marshall that he wanted the Australian I Corps to liberate Borneo (Operation Oboe) in order to free its oil resources for use during the invasion of Japan. Although Marshall hesitated to give his approval, MacArthur met with Australian General Sir Thomas Blamey in Manila in March to perfect his invasion plans. But Blamey dragged his feet: Since August 1944, he had been harshly criticized by the Australian parliament for launching a series of overland offensives against Japanese stay-behind forces bypassed by MacArthur—in Bougainville, New Britain, and New Guinea. Blamey’s operations did not sit well with the majority of the Australian people, or with Australian conservatives, who described his offensives as an unnecessary waste of lives. Blamey defended himself, but poorly. Australian soldiers, he said, were demoralized by sitting and not fighting, Australia could gain battlefield honors by liberating its own territories, and the country needed to show the United States that it was a good ally. Blamey’s claims brought derisive hoots from his detractors, who pointed out that there was nothing so demoralizing as being killed and that the Bougainville campaign was, as a number of Australia’s soldiers later wrote, “a politicians’ war and served no other purpose than to keep men in the fight.” Furthermore, the Australian public was fed up with the ceaseless MacArthur communiqués extolling the Americans while rarely mentioning the Australians.

The Operation Oboe controversy reached all the way to Manila, where MacArthur defended Blamey, praised Australian soldiers, and criticized Blamey’s detractors. But while MacArthur’s inattention to the Australians had been tolerated by Prime Minister Curtin and Blamey
throughout the war, that was less true now. In April 1945, Australian opposition leader Archibald Cameron spurred his government to question MacArthur’s use of the term “mopping up,” which is how MacArthur characterized what Australia’s Diggers were doing. The criticism, set out in a scathing letter written to MacArthur by Acting Prime Minister Joseph Benedict “Ben” Chifley (John Curtin was ill and would not survive the war), quoted extensively from MacArthur’s communiqués, none of which mentioned the Australians. In what sense, Chifley asked, did MacArthur use the term “mopping up” in his communiqués of June 7, August 13, and February 16? MacArthur responded with a high-handed lecture. “For your personal information,” he wrote to Chifley, “the military significance of the term ‘mopping up’ implies the completion of the destruction or dispersal of all organized resistance in the immediate area of combat. The communiqués to which reference is made are perfectly clear and completely accurate.” He then concluded, angrily, by admitting that while he was “out of touch with what is going on along these lines in Australia,” he suggested that Australia’s government “take adequate steps to see that truth and justice are presented, in so far as past campaigns are concerned.”

Blamey was not only reluctant to go forward with Oboe, but also upset to learn that during the operation, he would be reporting to Eichelberger and not to MacArthur. Although the Australians had cooperated with MacArthur’s command arrangements in 1942, tolerating the creation of a separate Alamo Force that contained no Aussie Diggers, that was
then
. Back then, Australia’s leaders viewed MacArthur as the nation’s savior and had received assurances that Australian soldiers would share the limelight with the Americans. Then too, although Allied armies in both the Pacific and Europe had engaged in operations that seemed nonessential, the invasion of Borneo seemed especially unnecessary: Its huge oil resources were not essential to Japan’s defeat, and Brunei, where the landings would take place, was actually a British protectorate. The Australians were more than willing to fight the Japanese when it came to protecting Australia, but it was another thing to fight them to liberate a British colony. Blamey dug in his heels. “The insinuation of American control and the elimination of Australian control has been gradual,” Blamey wrote to his government, “but I think the time has come when
the matter should be faced quite squarely, if the Australian Government and the Australian High Command are not to become ciphers in the control of the Australian Military Forces.”

Realizing that persuasion alone wouldn’t convince Blamey of his point of view, MacArthur offered a compromise: Blamey, he said, could have full command of Australia’s soldiers and report up the chain of command to
him
, not Eichelberger. This satisfied Blamey, but it had little impact on George Marshall, who withheld his support for Oboe, eventually agreeing to it only belatedly. Ironically, Marshall seems to have been brought around by King, who had been working through all of April and May 1945 to undermine a similar argument by Britain. The British argued that they needed a role in the fight against Japan and so should command all British Commonwealth (primarily Indian, Australian, and New Zealand) forces in the Pacific. King supported Oboe not simply because it would recognize Australia’s role in the Pacific, but also because the operation would drive a wedge between the Australians and the British. And this is precisely what happened. When Ben Chifley became prime minister after Curtin’s death in July 1945, he informed Churchill that Australia wanted the same policy-making role in any commonwealth force that it had enjoyed with the Americans. As Chifley noted, the role would “guarantee her an effective voice in the peace settlement.” This assertion was patent nonsense: The Australians had never had a policy-making role at MacArthur’s headquarters, and Chifley knew it. In other words, while Chifley might have been angered when MacArthur ignored Australia’s wartime sacrifices, he much preferred this to having Australia’s Diggers serve under a British commander.

Although King later denied that he wanted to cut the British out of the Pacific War, at key points in mid-1945 he criticized their naval capabilities by pointing out that they had no refueling capacity, were short of transports, and would have to be resupplied by the Americans. If the British wanted someone to fight for their colonies, he believed, they could do it themselves. MacArthur agreed: It was the Americans who had been carrying the weight of the war against Japan and had done so since the British Far East fleet was bombed out of existence in December 1941. Now, just when the Japanese were on the verge of defeat, the British wanted in on the action—just as they had insisted
that one of their senior officers be appointed as a deputy commander to Eisenhower.

Inevitably, King was forced to shift his position, but only after it was decided that keeping the British out of the Pacific fight would raise too many questions with the American public and after Churchill warned that sidelining British forces would sow mistrust between the Allies. A final argument came from John Winant, the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, who was intent on shooting down anti-British sentiment among the Joint Chiefs. America should welcome the deployment of the British navy to the Pacific, he argued, because to do otherwise would “create in the United States a hatred for Great Britain that will make for schisms in the postwar years that will defeat everything that men have died for in this war.” Finally, after wavering between King’s views and his own political instincts, Marshall agreed with Winant: The American commander did not want to have to explain why only Americans would have the “privilege” of dying in Japan. Furthermore, British (and commonwealth) participation in the Japan invasion, no matter how modest, could also lessen the manpower pressures placed on the JCS. This meant that the Australians would have to be kept in the fight. So Marshall signed off on Oboe while pointedly withholding his approval of MacArthur’s suggestion that it be followed with an invasion of the Netherlands East Indies. After all, the Dutch had had little to offer in the way of support for the invasion of Japan, which wasn’t true for the British.

In retrospect, Marshall’s foot-dragging on approving Oboe was part of his attempt to put his personal stamp on the last months of the war and (as he had done with Eisenhower) impose discipline on American military planning. Doing so now, after Roosevelt’s death, was more important than ever. With Eisenhower, Marshall had insisted—ordered—that the celebrated general make do with what he had. But with MacArthur, the demands were different: The Southwest Pacific commander was to bring his staff under control and finally get rid of Richard Sutherland, who had wheedled himself back into MacArthur’s confidence after months of being denied access to his office. During the second week of April 1945, Marshall detailed his views on Sutherland in a carefully drafted memo. In the memo, he expressed his disapproval of the views that MacArthur
had given to reporter and MacArthur biographer Frazier Hunt. The importance of army-navy cooperation in the coming invasion of Japan was crucial, Marshall wrote, and he added that the primary obstacle to that cooperation was Sutherland. Sutherland’s attitude, Marshall noted, “in almost every case seems to have been that he knew it all and nobody else knew much of anything,” and the chief directed that Sutherland be barred from future interservice conferences. Although Marshall eventually decided against sending this memo, his views signaled his increasing conviction that in the months ahead, MacArthur’s independence would have to be curtailed. In this, Marshall had the support of a new president, Harry Truman.

In fact, Truman despised MacArthur. “He’s worse than the Cabots and the Lodges—they at least talked to one another before they told God what to do,” Truman had confided to his diary soon after becoming president. “Mac tells God right off. It is a very great pity that we have stuffed shirts like that in key positions. I don’t see why in Hell Roosevelt didn’t order Wainwright home [from Corregidor] and let MacArthur be the martyr. . . . We’d have a real fighting man if we had Wainwright and not a play actor and bunko man such as we have now.” As it turns out, Truman regularly used the term “bunko man” to describe those he didn’t like (nearly all of them were Republicans), and he later included Dwight Eisenhower in the group when the general ran for the presidency in 1952. MacArthur reciprocated Truman’s views, though he kept his private: Truman, he felt, was not up to the job.

O
peration Oboe One began on May 1, when Australian assault forces landed on Tarakan, off Borneo’s northeastern shore. The Australians moved quickly inland, where they engaged Japanese defenders in a bloody fight for Tarakan city before pushing them into the island’s mountains. “Uncle Dan the Amphibious Man” Barbey oversaw the operation, later issuing criticisms that Australia’s troops were “behind the times” and unskilled. His words set off a furor in Australia. Caught now by his own promises, MacArthur pointedly defended the Australians.

“I am entirely at a loss to account for any criticism of the Tarakan operation,” he wrote to the Australian cabinet. “It has been completely
successful and has been accomplished without the slightest hitch.” With Australian troops ashore, Australian government leader Chifley now followed MacArthur’s lead: He “deplored” the criticisms as “unfair to the Supreme Commander, in whom the Government has entire confidence.” On June 3, as if to underscore his concern for his troops, MacArthur embarked on a “grand tour,” as Eichelberger dubbed it, of the central Philippines and Borneo, like a latter-day Hadrian touring his conquests. He ladled out praise, promotions, and decorations wherever he went, alighting from the USS
Boise
to splash ashore at Mindanao, Cebu City, Palawan, and, finally, Brunei Bay, where he watched the Australians make their assault. The next day, he waded through the surf at Brunei Bluff, then traveled overland to the front lines. He stood over two Japanese corpses, a replay of his Los Negros landing, as nearby Japanese snipers targeted him. Four days later, after a visit to Zamboanga, he ordered the
Boise
back to Manila—then changed his mind. On July 1, he witnessed what turned out to be the final amphibious assault of the war, at Balikpapan, where, with Daniel Barbey in tow, he inspected Australian fighting units. Barbey later recalled the episode:

    
With his party he climbed a small shale hill, dotted with Australian foxholes, which was less than 200 yards from the enemy front lines. An Aussie major came running up and warned everybody to take cover as there was a machine-gun nest in a nearby hilltop. Before he had finished, there was the rat-tat-tat of machine gun bullets. In a few seconds the firing had stopped, apparently smothered by the Australians, but not before all of us had dropped. But not MacArthur. He was still standing there looking over his map, quite unperturbed as I and the others took a more upright position.

MacArthur returned to the
Boise
and ordered it back to Manila, where it arrived on July 3.

The next day, at his headquarters, MacArthur reviewed his staff’s work on Operation Downfall, the plan for the invasion of Japan. Plans had first taken form in August 1942, when a JCS committee produced a working paper that detailed six “phases” leading to Japan’s surrender, one option of which recommended a blockade of the islands. An October
1943 plan envisioned an invasion, but only of the northern island of Hokkaido, followed by a second invasion of the main Japanese island of Honshu. But it was not until George Marshall took matters in hand that a more detailed approach emerged, the result of work done by General Charles Bonesteel and General George A. Lincoln of the Pentagon’s Strategy Policy Committee.