Vanished (13 page)

The
Baltimore
was a heavy cruiser, barely a year old, but already hardened from battle. Since her arrival in the Central Pacific, she had been part of the Battle of Makin, and then the Battle of Kwajalein, and most recently, the vast carrier battle in the Marianas. Now, with the Japanese fleet in tatters, she had returned to California for a few days at the port of San Diego, before turning back toward the war with the commander in chief on board. Roosevelt’s health was dwindling, and he had no plans to enter the combat zone. But he was well aware that during an election year a visit to the troops was politically savvy, especially if he arrived on the deck of a triumphant warship.

While the
Baltimore
steamed west from San Diego, other ships from the Marianas battle were moving on to new targets. No archipelago in a thousand-mile radius was more heavily defended than Palau, with twenty-five thousand Japanese troops digging furiously into the hills. On July 25, as Roosevelt closed in on Hawaii, the carrier USS
San Jacinto
sent a small squadron of planes over Palau on a photographic mission. By the end of the day, Ensign George Bush would sink his first enemy ship, setting the stage for Pat Scannon’s journey fifty years later.

But the farther American troops advanced, the more urgent the strategic question became. Only one of the two columns could make the final push into Japan. The trouble was, even most American commanders were unsure which track to recommend. Many had changed their preference multiple times throughout the war. As the leader of the northern column, Nimitz embodied the Navy’s strategy to seize Taiwan, but on a personal level, Nimitz was not convinced that the plan was better than MacArthur’s. One of his leading commanders, Admiral Bull Halsey, supported a combination of the two strategies, while the Army’s chief of
staff, General George Marshall, vacillated between support for MacArthur’s plan, and distaste for MacArthur himself. Trying to keep track of each commander’s latest assessment could be a dizzying task. As the historian William Manchester described the strategic landscape in his biography of MacArthur,
American Caesar
, “Individuals changed their minds from week to week. Marshall was beginning to side with MacArthur. Hap Arnold, eager for B-29 bases on [Taiwan], continued to support King. Nimitz, wavering, instructed his staff to draw up plans for assaults on all possible objectives, including the Japanese homeland; he had begun to listen to Halsey, who wanted to seize Luzon, ignore Formosa, and pounce on Okinawa.
The Joint Chiefs reflected the general confusion
.”

By the time Roosevelt landed at Pearl Harbor on July 26, he had made up his mind to end the debate for good. He called for both Nimitz and MacArthur to spend a few days with him in Hawaii, where they would visit military bases, shake hands with the troops, pose for a few politically useful photos, and then retreat to a private mansion overlooking Waikiki to study maps and discuss the options.

It was time for the men leading the war to choose its final path.

—

C
HESTER
N
IMITZ
and Douglas MacArthur were as different as the columns they led. At sixty-four, MacArthur was the most famous general in the Army, and had been for most of his adult life. He’d graduated from West Point in 1903 with the highest academic score ever recorded, been nominated for two Medals of Honor in World War I, and became the youngest major general in the Army at age forty-five. By the time he was named Army chief of staff a few years later, he was known as much for his eccentricity as his precocious command. At his office in Washington, DC, it was not uncommon to find the general sitting behind his desk in a Japanese kimono, waving himself with an Asian fan, and chain-smoking cigarettes through a bejeweled holder. He “
increasingly spoke of himself
in
the third person,” William Manchester wrote, “and had erected a fifteen-foot-high mirror behind his office chair to heighten his image.”

In 1935, MacArthur left his position in Washington and moved to the Philippines, where he promptly took a position as the leader of the Philippine army, parading about in an embroidered uniform with a golden baton. But as the shadow of Japan loomed over the Pacific, Roosevelt called him back to service as the head of American forces in the region. With the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, MacArthur found himself under siege, and he spent three months hiding in an underground bunker on a small island just south of the Bataan Peninsula, before escaping in March 1942 with his family, their nanny, and
a small fortune acquired illegally
from the Philippine government. By the time he regrouped to lead the southern column toward Japan, he was as polarizing as any other figure in American life: Some dismissed him as “Dugout Doug” for his months in hiding, while others praised him for having lasted there so long. Parents named their children for him.
The Blackfeet Indians
called him Chief Wise Eagle.

Roosevelt’s view of MacArthur was mixed. They had been friends early in their careers, but by the summer of 1944, the relationship was thorny at best. Just three months before their meeting in Hawaii, MacArthur had finally put to rest a long-standing rumor, circulated by his friend William Randolph Hearst, that the general planned to challenge the president in the fall election. To Roosevelt, it seemed as if MacArthur’s denial was a long time coming. For MacArthur’s part, the summons to meet Roosevelt in Hawaii came as a personal affront. To be called away from his base, just days after the Democratic nomination, was a distraction he did not take well. On the twenty-six-hour flight to Hawaii, he paced the aisle of the plane, muttering about “
the humiliation of forcing me
to leave my command and fly to Honolulu for a political picture-taking junket!”

Nimitz, meanwhile, was everything Douglas MacArthur was not. Born to a family of hoteliers in the hills of central Texas, he maintained a crisp and private demeanor, and was allergic to every form of spectacle, including war. As the author Robert Sherrod put it in the Pacific history
On to Westward
, “
Nimitz conceived of war as something
to be accomplished as efficiently and as smoothly as possible, without too much fanfare.”

Unlike MacArthur, Nimitz had risen to power steadily, almost accidentally. His first interest had been the Army, but when he was turned down by West Point, he entered the Naval Academy instead. During World War I, he’d seen no action, spending the first few months on a refueling ship, and the rest in a submarine division, at a time when, as he put it, “undersea craft were regarded as
a cross between a Jules Verne fantasy and a whale
.” While MacArthur’s military profile was so prodigious that he’d been recalled to leadership even before the war, Nimitz had only taken charge of the Pacific Fleet after the embarrassment at Pearl Harbor left a vacuum in naval leadership. All of which only underscored the fact that Nimitz was the real thing: a commander who had risen to the occasion, and not been groomed for it. At his headquarters in Pearl Harbor, he insisted on hiring a staff that represented all military services, and he demanded that they wear a special uniform to eliminate branch distinctions. He was meticulous, punctual, and borderline obsessive, with a seven-day workweek, and he expected the same from his men, although he encouraged them to break for thirty minutes a day to exercise. In his own free time, he would repair to the firing range with his pistol. Like Roosevelt, he often traveled with his dog, a schnauzer named Mak that was, in the words of historian Max Hastings, “
a mean little dog which growled
.”

By the time Nimitz left his office to welcome Roosevelt on the docks of Pearl Harbor, he was, at fifty-nine years old, the youngest of the three men called to the meeting and also the oldest-looking, with a strained, pale face, thinning white hair, and ramrod posture. He stood frozen in his dress whites as the president’s ship tied off, then he climbed aboard regally amid cheers from a small crowd.

MacArthur, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found. He had arrived an hour earlier, but rather than greet the president, decided to drop his bags at a friend’s house and enjoy a steamy bath. Roosevelt and Nimitz
waited for MacArthur on the deck of the
Baltimore
for about an hour before giving up. “Just as we were getting ready to go below,” one of the president’s aides recalled, “a terrific automobile siren was heard, and there raced to the dock and screeched to a stop a motorcycle escort and the longest open car I have ever seen. In the front was a chauffeur in khaki, and in the back,
one lone figure—MacArthur
.”

After a few photos on the deck, the men dispersed for the evening, but they gathered in the morning to make a tour of Hawaiian bases. They stopped at Hickam to visit men wounded on Saipan and watched a mock invasion of a Japanese village at the Schofield Barracks. Finally, they made their way to the hills above Waikiki for dinner.

The vast stucco mansion where they would spend the evening had once belonged to a wealthy businessman named Christian Holmes II, who was heir to the Fleischmann’s Yeast fortune and had served under Teddy Roosevelt in the Army. In the years since then, Holmes had been married and divorced three times, much to the chagrin of his mother, who purchased a small tuna-canning company and installed Holmes as president, in order, as she put it, “
to keep him occupied
.” When Holmes was not feeling especially occupied by the canning business, he filled his time with lavish parties,
hosting stars and starlets like Amelia Earhart and Shirley Temple
in another of his opulent homes, a three-level manse built on a private island, with fish tanks lining the walls of the foyer, and a personal bowling alley and movie theater inside. Outside, he collected exotic animals like giraffes and elephants. For Holmes, the mansion overlooking Waikiki was something of a spare, and he allowed the Navy to use it as a rest home for aviators just back from the war. Five months before Roosevelt’s arrival on the island, Holmes had taken his own life with pills, but his estate left the mansion available to Roosevelt as a kind of Waikiki White House.

Though MacArthur had been leading the Army’s southern column for years, he and Roosevelt had not seen each other since before the war. The sight of Roosevelt was distressing to MacArthur. Ravaged by illness as a young man, the president managed to hide the paralysis of his legs from
the public, but now he was also suffering from massive arteriosclerosis and congestive heart failure, which left him so gaunt, gray, and depleted that MacArthur doubted he would survive much longer. Roosevelt’s doctors wondered, too. Just four days before the president left for Hawaii, one of them, Frank Lahey, had written a confidential memo concluding that he “
did not believe that if Mr. Roosevelt
were elected President again, he had the physical capacity to complete a term.” MacArthur described Roosevelt’s appearance as “shocking.” Later he wrote, “
Physically he was just a shell
of the man I had known. It was clearly evident that his days were numbered.”

After dinner at the Holmes mansion, Roosevelt, MacArthur, and Nimitz moved into an adjoining room to discuss the war. It was a cavernous space filled with antique lamps and luxurious sofas, but the three men perched on a row of bamboo chairs facing an enormous map of the Pacific. Roosevelt turned to MacArthur. “Well, Douglas,” he said. “
Where do we go from here
?”

For the next two hours, MacArthur and Nimitz took turns at the map—pacing before it, pointing at key positions with a long rod, and arguing the merits of each approach. As Nimitz pushed for the northern track across the Central Pacific, MacArthur sat with his head cocked to one side, feigning interest. Privately, he guessed that Nimitz was conflicted. He was a loyal admiral and would promote the Navy plan, but it had been drawn up by his boss, Admiral Ernest King in Washington, and MacArthur had come to the conclusion that Nimitz would be happy with either option. “
Nimitz put forth the Navy plan
,” MacArthur wrote later, “but I was sure it was King’s and not his own.”

MacArthur was as resolute as Nimitz was uncertain. He not only preferred the southern strategy, he despised the northern one. In addition to the moral and strategic problem of bypassing the Philippines, he realized that the northern strategy would require him to give up command. “
All of my American forces
, except a token group of two divisions and a few air squadrons, were to be transferred to the command of Admiral
Nimitz,” he wrote. This was unthinkable. When it was MacArthur’s turn to speak, he grabbed the pointer and swept it over the map in dramatic strokes to highlight the crucial lines. There was the new Japanese perimeter, laying claim to a long trail of islands from Thailand to New Guinea. There was the flow of oil rising up from those islands, past the Philippines, toward Tokyo. And there was MacArthur’s column, poised to capture the Philippines, stop the oil, and strike Japan from a position of strength. Any other approach, he insisted, would be ineffective, inexcusable, and ruinous to America’s reputation. “
I felt that to sacrifice the Philippines
a second time could not be condoned or forgiven,” he wrote. “I argued that it was not only a moral obligation to release this friendly possession from the enemy, now that it had become possible, but that to fail to do so would not be understandable to the Oriental mind.”

The debate continued into the night, but by the time the men parted company, Roosevelt was still undecided. He asked the commanders to meet him again in the morning and trundled off to bed with the direction of the war hanging in the balance.

With it hung Palau. Either strategy would include an assault on the islands, but they were far more important to MacArthur. In the Navy’s plan to take Taiwan, Palau was just an outpost on the flank. One of the top Navy commanders, Bull Halsey, was concerned that the islands were not worth taking at all. He’d been
arguing since early summer
that Palau should be blockaded and bypassed. Yet for MacArthur, the drive from New Guinea to the Philippines went directly through Palau. His planners described the islands as the “
key point
” in Japan’s defenses. If Roosevelt chose the southern option, there was little chance that MacArthur would bypass the islands, especially on the advice of a Navy admiral.