The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (35 page)

After hours of tense discussion, it was clear that moving Krueger’s Alamo Force into the Admiralty Islands couldn’t be done. Every time a new schedule was proposed, Daniel Barbey shook his head, arguing that he had enough landing craft to move troops onto a single beach, but not for multiple landings. Kenney, too, was still short of air assets. MacArthur’s command also faced the problem Ghormley had faced back in New Caledonia: Over one hundred unloaded supply ships lay at anchor at Milne Bay. Supply chief Richard Marshall struggled to iron out these difficulties, and MacArthur set aside hours every day to review port data. He was also stymied by requirements that transports arriving in Australia be offloaded and returned stateside. At one point, to solve the problem, he simply instructed Marshall to expropriate the ships he needed, a brazen act of theft that brought howls from the War Department. But MacArthur had to tread lightly because the JCS could resolve his supply problems by simply ordering him to stop his offensive. So he
demanded that his staff rethink their plans, using what resources they had to keep the enemy off balance. Finally, after hours of difficult debate, he announced that he was adjourning the meeting until the next morning. But on his way out the door, he exploded. “There are some people in Washington who would rather see MacArthur lose a battle than America win a war,” he said.

B
y “some people in Washington,” Douglas MacArthur meant Ernie King. MacArthur blamed King for his shortfall in cruisers, destroyers, and landing craft; for his meager numbers of fighters, bombers, and transports; and for his constant struggle to find more soldiers. While MacArthur’s animus for King was well known, in this instance he was right—Ernie King was plotting against him. Back in August 1943, at the Allies’ Quadrant Meeting in Quebec, the Americans and the British had not only set a date for the invasion of France, but also approved King’s plea for increased resources for Chester Nimitz, who was beginning his island-hopping campaign across the Central Pacific. King had always viewed the Nimitz offensive as the key to Japan’s defeat—and George Marshall agreed. Which is why King now supported Marshall’s fight with the British for an invasion of France. At Quebec (with North Africa conquered, Stalin saved, and Sicily seized), King cashed in, supporting Marshall’s argument for a cross-channel invasion while Marshall supported him on Nimitz. As a result, not only was MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific command now last on the list of Allied priorities, but the list had actually grown. Worse yet, the Combined Chiefs agreed that spreading resources into England, Italy, Russia, Burma, and now the Central Pacific meant that MacArthur would have to scale back his Cartwheel plans. Rabaul, they determined, would not be conquered; it would be “bypassed.”

The decision was a hammer-blow for MacArthur, who had spent weeks stooped over his maps searching for a way back to Manila. Even more worrisome was that the communiqué issued at the end of the Quebec conclave didn’t even mention the Philippines, a silence that MacArthur interpreted as a signal that it, too, might be bypassed, with King and Nimitz reaping the plaudits that were (as he thought) rightfully his. MacArthur was not alone in this view. The Australian press jumped on
the news from Quebec, complaining that MacArthur was no more than a “garrison commander.” For many in Australia, the results of the Quebec conference smacked of another British-inspired plot. That view seeped into MacArthur’s command, as noted by Colonel William Ritchie, Marshall’s liaison in Brisbane. “In discussions with General MacArthur and Sutherland,” Ritchie informed Marshall, “it is quite evident that they sincerely feel that there is an intention on the part of the Combined Chiefs of Staff to pinch off the operations of the Southwest Pacific forces. . . . The principle basis for this belief seems to be the treatment of the Far East and Pacific war strategy by the British which they assume is inspired, together with certain rather devious Navy propaganda to the effect that this would be a naval show from New Guinea on.”

In Washington, Marshall read the dispatch and decided that he was duty bound to defend his Quebec decisions even as he tried to calm MacArthur. Marshall’s October 2 cable to MacArthur is a masterly mix of hope and terse bluntness, defending the Nimitz decision while dangling the prospect of a Philippines operation. The Combined Chiefs had confirmed the seizure of “the Admiralty Islands, Bismarck Archipelago and the North coast of New Guinea,” Marshall told MacArthur, adding that “the next logical objective for the Southwest Pacific Forces is the seizure of Mindanao.” But this was only partly true. For while he dangled Mindanao as the “next logical objective,” Marshall put MacArthur on notice that the JCS believed that the best way to defeat Japan was by supporting Nimitz’s Central Pacific campaign. “Our rapid expansion and immediate availability of naval surface forces including carriers is giving us a decided advantage in naval strength,” he said. “Not to make full use of this would be a serious error.” Back in Brisbane, MacArthur mulled over what Marshall said and, for once, didn’t respond. Instead, he and Sutherland made life as difficult as they could for the navy. Sutherland kept naval officers visiting MacArthur cooling their heels, while MacArthur waged a campaign to replace Admiral Arthur Carpender, the commander of his naval forces.

Carpender was a thoughtful and articulate officer, but the ambiguous command arrangements (he received his evaluations from King) put him in an impossible situation. Nimitz was hardly an innocent player in this tussle, pointedly issuing Carpender orders without informing
MacArthur. The sniping between MacArthur and Nimitz was bound to break into the open, and it did in October, when Kenney confronted Carpender over control of naval air assets. Kenney argued that navy fliers should be under his, Kenney’s, control, while Carpender sided with Nimitz: These were navy fliers, he argued, and Kenney was an army air force officer. If Nimitz’s purpose was to enrage MacArthur, he succeeded, but the victim wasn’t MacArthur. It was Carpender. After MacArthur’s second complaint against Carpender, King ordered the naval commander back to Washington and replaced him with Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, a hero of the Guadalcanal campaign. But although King intended to dampen his disagreements with MacArthur, he had failed to tell him of the change, thus sparking yet another skirmish. Surprisingly, King backed down, telling Marshall that as Kinkaid’s assignment was not yet official, he was willing to change his mind. Marshall, relieved, cabled MacArthur: Was Kinkaid acceptable? MacArthur, satisfied, agreed, and Marshall followed up with a message praising the appointment. “Kinkaid has performed outstanding service against the Japs,” he wrote. “[H]is relations have been particularly efficient and happy with Army commanders.”

In fact, Kinkaid was an excellent choice. He knew the army well (having served with Army General Simon Bolivar Buckner in Alaska, when the Japanese occupied Attu), and it helped that he was escorted to Brisbane by Bill Halsey, who gave Kinkaid his back-slapping blessing. Kinkaid followed Halsey’s lead, pledging his loyalty to his new commander—and standing up to him. When MacArthur harangued the new naval head about his need for aircraft carriers, Kinkaid responded that MacArthur didn’t actually need them. Carriers were vulnerable in the Southwest Pacific, he argued, and useless when docked in Melbourne. We will win without them, he added. MacArthur thought about this for a minute and then harrumphed—he had never heard that before, but it made sense. “My door is always open,” he told Kinkaid. Within days, the new head of the U.S. Seventh Fleet (“MacArthur’s Navy,” as War Department planners called it) had taken an office at the AMP Building and decided that MacArthur’s problem was not the navy, or King, or Nimitz. The problem was that MacArthur feared that Nimitz’s Central Pacific offensive meant that his own pledge to return to the
Philippines would be forgotten. The only way to make sure this didn’t happen, Kinkaid decided, was for MacArthur to win, which was something that Kinkaid knew how to do.

K
inkaid arrived in Brisbane three days after the beginning of Chester Nimitz’s Central Pacific campaign, which envisioned the capture of the Gilbert and Marshall Atolls, the neutralization of the Japanese naval base at Truk Island, and the seizure of the Mariana and Palau Islands. The Japanese remained a formidable opponent, even after their losses at Midway and Guadalcanal, with tens of thousands of their soldiers dug in along the arc of Nimitz’s advance. The Allies’ seizure of Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands, was the step-off for a series of vaults northwest through the Marshalls and Marianas—coral atolls that would provide airfields for the increasingly lethal American bomber force. Nimitz planned well for Tarawa, sending an overwhelming force to protect the Marines ashore: six aircraft carriers, twelve battleships, twelve cruisers, and sixty-six destroyers. But the naval force did little to root out the Japanese. Tarawa was a replay of Buna, with Marines charging headlong against Japanese emplacements until after three horrific days, the guns fell silent. The Marines suffered more than a thousand killed and two thousand wounded in what Marine commander Holland Smith called “a terrible waste of life and effort.”

Tarawa more deeply rooted the antinavy animus in Brisbane, but Kinkaid shrugged off these slights and went to work in breaking MacArthur’s planning logjam. He resolved a festering dispute between Barbey and Kenney over the lack of air cover during an assault phase of an operation, then ironed out a problem between Barbey and Krueger over who would command an assault force between ship and shore. Krueger believed his soldiers should be under his command from the moment they entered a landing craft, while Barbey thought the idea ludicrous. Kinkaid mediated the dispute, telling MacArthur that Barbey should have command of the troops until the ground commander had set up his headquarters, and MacArthur agreed. Finally, Kinkaid weighed in on MacArthur’s next steps, supporting the 1st Marine Division’s view that Krueger’s plan for a parachute drop on Cape Gloucester, the far western headland of New Britain Island, was too risky. The
resulting compromise (Operation Dexterity) was far simpler: Before the Marines seized Cape Gloucester, Krueger’s 112th Cavalry Regiment would storm Arawe, along New Britain’s southern coast, and as the Japanese turned to fight Krueger, they would find the 1st Marine Division in their rear.

And that’s exactly the way it happened, or nearly so. On December 15, Texans from the 112th Cavalry Regiment of Alamo Force were brought ashore by Uncle Dan’s “webbed feet” at Arawe on New Britain Island. At the same time, Kenney’s fighters and bombers roared overhead and ships from Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet blanketed the Japanese beach defenses with salvos of screaming shells. The 112th met little opposition, but over the next two days, the Japanese struck back in force, sending groups of reinforcements south to contest Krueger’s landings. The Japanese defense of Arawe was not as intense as Krueger had predicted, however, because they refused to divert their forces south, believing that MacArthur’s main effort would come elsewhere. Even so, the fight for Arawe went on through the next month. With Krueger ashore at Arawe, Rupertus prepared two Marine regimental combat teams for the landings on New Britain’s north coast, where a Japanese division awaited them. Rupertus’s targets, two airfields near Cape Gloucester, would bring Kenney’s bombers within easy range of Japan’s Rabaul anchorage.

On Christmas Day, one day before the Marines were scheduled to go ashore, MacArthur visited them at their staging area on Goodenough Island. His visit was risky: The 1st Marines had left hundreds of dead on Guadalcanal, while the navy that he had criticized traded murderous salvos with the Japanese in the Slot. And what had MacArthur and the army done? They’d “skirmished” with “starving Japs” at “bloody Buna.” Still, MacArthur did the best he could, smiling and shaking hands with Rupertus and his troopers in the midst of a downpour. Finishing his visit, MacArthur wisely dispensed with his usual morale boosting send-off, turning instead to speak with Rupertus. “I know what the Marines think of me,” he said, “but I also know that when they go into a fight they can be counted upon to do an outstanding job. Good luck.” The Marines landed the next day at Cape Gloucester, on Yellow Beaches (1 and 2) and Green Beach. The Japanese didn’t contest the landings,
saving their fight for the high ground behind the landing zones. But the real enemy was the monsoon, as the Marines slogged forward under fire to secure the airfields MacArthur needed. “It never quit raining at Cape Gloucester,” one Marine remembered. “You never could get dried out. You were wet all day, every day.”

To secure what he had gained on New Britain, MacArthur pushed his planners to put together a third landing, this time at Saidor, in northern New Guinea. Walter Krueger thought the operation unnecessary, but MacArthur argued that capturing Saidor would protect the Marines on Cape Gloucester and spring a surprise on the already reeling Japanese. It was time, he said, “to put the cork in the bottle”—to cut off Rabaul from the south and west, leaving only the Admiralty Islands, to Rabaul’s north, and New Ireland, to its east, to be stormed. MacArthur’s decision was so sudden that it did not leave time for Krueger to put his elite Alamo Scouts, his small but highly trained intelligence unit, onto Saidor before the operation. The operation was a “reconnaissance in force” that emphasized MacArthur’s obsession with “operational tempo” of moving quickly, and constantly, to keep the enemy off balance. He had struggled with this on Luzon, against Homma, but now had a chance to turn the tables. The very idea of stopping to rest and refit was abhorrent to MacArthur, as it contravened what he had learned as a young officer in France, where the surest way to die was to dig in. And yet, MacArthur’s insistence that Saidor be seized was so hastily planned that it is difficult to shake the suspicion that its conquest had more to do with his race with Nimitz than it did with reducing Rabaul.

When seven thousand GIs of his newly refurbished and rested 32nd Division came ashore at Saidor on January 2, MacArthur was ahead of Nimitz, one leap away from Mindanao, and one step away from his pledge to return to the Philippines. But what MacArthur didn’t know was that the path to the Philippines didn’t run through Arawe or Saidor, or even Rabaul. The path to the Philippines ran through Franklin Roosevelt.