The Philippines were doomed whether or not General Douglas MacArthur stayed on Corregidor, as implied by the above question. A foremost authority on the Pacific war maintains, “The defense of the 7,100 islands in the Philippine archipelago, lying in an exposed position 7,000 miles from the west coast of the United States, was over thirty years the basic problem of Pacific strategy. From the start it was apparent that it would be impossible to defend all or even the major islands.”1
United States war plans in effect at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack (Rainbow 5 and War Plan Orange 3) stated that the American and Filipino armed forces in the archipelago could hold out for only four to six months in the event of a Japanese invasion. The main forces on Luzon, considered the most strategically significant island of the Philippines, would withdraw to the Bataan peninsula and the four small island fortresses at and near Corregidor, from which they would protect Manila Bay. According to some Orange editions, American ships would try to reinforce the Philippine forces before the four to six months were up; unless they were somehow successful, the Japanese would definitely take the Philippines.
With the crippling of the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor during the first strike of the war, any substantial reinforcement of the Philippines became impossible, making the islands' surrender to the Japanese inevitable. Even without the losses at Pearl Harbor, successful reinforcement by the United States would have been uncertain. Within several weeks of the first Japanese air attacks against Philippine targets on 8 December 1941, most remaining American naval and air forces in the Philippines had moved to the Netherlands East Indies. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt and War Department officials, especially Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, tried to get aid to the American forces remaining in the Philippines, they held no real hope of success. Roosevelt wrote Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson on 30 December 1941, “I wish that War Plans [Division] would explore every possible means of relieving the Philippines. I realize great risks are involved but the objective is important.”2 On 9 February 1942, Roosevelt wrote to MacArthur about “the desperate situation to which you may shortly be reduced – I particularly request that you proceed rapidly to the organization of your forces and your defenses so as to make your resistance as effective as circumstances will permit and as prolonged as humanly possible.”3
The President decided to order MacArthur out of the Philippines to prevent the Japanese from capturing him when the inevitable surrender came. The records do not indicate whether FDR gave any consideration to leaving him to surrender on Corregidor, but General Marshall and Secretary of War Stimson are known to have favored his rescue. On 22 February Roosevelt issued the orders for MacArthur to leave the islands, with the eventual destination of Australia. MacArthur requested that he be allowed to leave at the time he considered best. Actually, he and his wife and four-year-old son, along with seventeen members of his staff, did not depart until 11 March on the hazardous journey to Australia.
Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright, who succeeded MacArthur in the Philippine command, surrendered to the Japanese in early May. Bataan had fallen a month earlier. It is difficult to imagine that MacArthur's continued presence on Corregidor could have prevented the capitulation to the Japanese, although the surrender would perhaps have been executed with less confusion. There were problems associated with obtaining formal authorization from the United States government to surrender; with attempts by Wainwright to prevent the surrender of forces in the southern Philippines by telling them to report to MacArthur; and with Wainwright's subsequent orders to them to surrender on his authority because he feared a massacre of his forces on Corregidor, since they had already laid down their arms. Some of this would possibly have gone smoother with MacArthur still in command on Corregidor, but the fact that the Philippines were doomed would not have been affected.
If MacArthur had surrendered to the Japanese in the Philippines, what would have been the personal effect on him? As a high-ranking officer, his treatment as a prisoner of war would have been better than that of captured enlisted men. As was the case with the other senior American officers in the Philippines, as well as Dutch and British commanders and high colonial officials captured during the fall of Southeast Asia, MacArthur would probably have been moved with them to prison camps (segregated from lower-ranking prisoners) in Formosa and later in Manchuria for the duration of the war. His wife and young son would probably have been interned in Manila and returned to the States in an exchange of civilian internees arranged by the Japanese and American governments.
Assuming MacArthur survived the period of captivity, his professional career would have ended with the war or soon afterward. In 1945 he was sixty-five years old (and he had already retired once from the Army, in 1937). Had he been held captive throughout the war, he would definitely not have been named to head the postwar occupation in Japan, nor would he have been given command of the United Nations forces in the Korean War five years later. To carry the point to its logical extreme, without MacArthur, a well-known successful general, in charge in Tokyo when the Korean War started, President Harry S. Truman would have been more hesitant to send military forces to Korea, and MacArthur's military career would not have ended with a dismissal by that President. Indeed, during the worst moments of their collision in 1951, Truman probably wished that FDR had left MacArthur on Corregidor.
If he had not evacuated MacArthur, Roosevelt would have suffered some domestic political fall-out for permitting the Japanese to capture such a high-ranking general, and the American public would have been furious with the Japanese. But Americans were already so angry about Pearl Harbor that MacArthur's capture could not have added much more wrath.
If MacArthur had been left to surrender on Corregidor, what would have been the effect on the war against Japan? Though the Allies would have won, the actual conduct of the war would have been different. Some operations would have remained the same, such as the decision to take Guadalcanal because of the Japanese threat to the line of communications between the United States and Australia. The role of the United States in operations in Burma and China would not have grown because of the enormous logistical difficulties in deploying men and materiel to those areas, the steadfastly low priority of the China-Burma-India theater in the global planning of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the delegation of the strategic direction of the war in China to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's headquarters, and in Burma to the British Chiefs of Staff Committee and the British-dominated Southeast Asia Command of Admiral Louis Mountbatten.
There would have been unity of command over American forces in the Pacific, with Admiral Chester W. Nimitz the likely head. He had been transferred to Pearl Harbor immediately after the Japanese attack and therefore was in the right spot. Also, in the dual theater command structure that included MacArthur, Nimitz was his counterpart, so Nimitz would have been the logical person to head the unified effort with MacArthur out of the picture. The close relationship of Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations and commander in chief, United States Fleet, with Nimitz and the frequency and detail of their communications, both in person and otherwise, would have given King and Nimitz a strong joint input in determining the United States course in the Pacific war. The American effort would have been predominantly naval (including Marines), as prewar plans had decreed.
The Pacific Ocean Areas theater of Admiral Nimitz would have received larger elements of the United States Army and Army Air Forces if MacArthur had not been the Southwest Pacific chief. Nevertheless, the leaders of those forces probably would not have been permitted much input into strategic planning at Nimitz's headquarters. The lack of a voice in such matters was a frequent complaint of Lieutenant General Robert C. Richardson, commander of Army ground and air forces in that theater, even when these were greatly increased for the Okinawa invasion in the spring of 1945. Perhaps some of the senior commanders who did serve in the Southwest Pacific under MacArthur, such as Generals Walter Krueger, Robert L. Eichelberger, and George C. Kenney and Admirals Thomas C. Kinkaid and Daniel E. Barbey, might have received commands in the later stages of the Pacific war, but the senior Army officers more likely would have gone to European assignments.
Although MacArthur had wanted the supreme Pacific command himself, he later observed regarding the need for unity of command in the Pacific struggle:
“Of all the faulty decisions of war perhaps the most unexplainable one was the failure to unify the command in the Pacific. The principle involved is the most fundamental one in the doctrine and tradition of command. In this instance it did not involve choosing one individual out of a number of Allied officers, although it was an accepted and entirely successful practice in the other great theaters. The failure to do so in the Pacific cannot be defended in logic, in theory, or in common sense. .. . It resulted in divided effort, the waste, diffusion, and duplication of force, and the consequent extension of the war, with added casualties and cost. The generally excellent co operation between the two commands in the Pacific … was no substitute for the essential unity of direction of centralized authority. The handicaps and hazards unnecessarily resulting were numerous, and many a man lies in his grave today who could have been saved.”4
Nearly all the senior commanders who served under Nimitz in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater and under MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific Area theater expressed similar sentiments after the war.
Would the war against Japan have ended any sooner with a different American command structure and different commanders? Of course, it is assumed that as far as commanders go, not only MacArthur but the officers who actually left the Philippines with him would not have participated in the war. If the end of the war could have been accomplished only by the atomic bomb, the changed command organization would not have shortened the war. If the different command arrangement and allocation of resources had proved to be more effective against Japan, leading to surrender without use of the atomic bomb (and the opportunistic Soviet entry into the war), then perhaps the answer is affirmative. However, the hostilities in Europe would have had to terminate much earlier.
It is unlikely that the war against Europe would have ended any sooner with a different American command structure and different commanders in the Pacific. There is no doubt that Anglo-American strategy would still have put the defeat of Germany first. Would Pacific operations have received fewer resources without MacArthur's strong and public pleas for more assistance to the war against Japan? Even though King did not like MacArthur or the very existence of his theater, MacArthur's constant requests and demands on behalf of the Pacific did bolster King's arguments for more emphasis on the war with Japan. Without having to send Army ground and air forces to MacArthur and the Southwest Pacific Area, Marshall would have devoted even more attention to the European war. There would have been more imbalance in American overseas deployments, with more of the Army and Army Air Forces units sent to the war in Europe and more of the Navy and Marine forces to the conflict in the Pacific.
MacArthur's absence would not have deterred Australia's growing alienation from the United Kingdom. Before the Southwest Pacific Area theater was formed and the United States began to send ground, sea, and air forces to Australia to build up a base of operations for a counteroffensive northward in 1942, Prime Minister John Curtin and his Labor government in Canberra already were angered over the British retention of Australian Army divisions in the North African desert war at a time when Australia considered its own defenses inadequate in the face of the advancing Japanese juggernaut through the Southwest Pacific. MacArthur did not lessen Australian frustration with the British, although for a while he did make the United States more popular in Australia, often teaming up with Curtin to demand from American and British leaders more resources for the war in the Southwest Pacific. Before the midway mark of the war, though, many Australians were alienated by MacArthur's arrogance and by the American soldiers' rowdiness and ethnocentrism.
Australia was too important as one of the last places in Southeast Asia and the West Pacific not dominated by Japan, as an important source of war materials and military manpower and as a future base of offensive operations, for the United States to totally ignore it. The first allied combined command, the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command (ABDACOM), had been formed in the Australian-East Indies area, so it would have been logical for the United States to participate in another combined command in the area. The new allied theater in March 1942 became the Southwest Pacific Area, and in the absence of MacArthur it is likely that the command, manpower, and material resources would have been provided largely by Australia. There would have been less contact with United States operations, which would have been concentrated in the Central Pacific.
An Australian, probably General Thomas Blamey, would have been named supreme commander of the Southwest Pacific theater. Australian ground forces, with support from American air and sea forces of moderate strength, would have conducted largely holding operations above Australia. Limited offensive operations to regain oil fields in Java, Borneo, and Sumatra might have been carried out by Blamey's army, particularly late in the war when Japanese forces in the Dutch East Indies had been drained by transfers to other combat zones.
By late 1943 Australians deeply resented the Anglo-American strategic leaders' disdain of Australia as an unequal alliance partner. By the time of the United Nations Conference at San Francisco in the spring of 1945, Australia had become a vociferous leader of the small nations against the major powers in world affairs. In the immediate postwar years she appeared at times more antagonistic toward the United Kingdom and the United States than toward even the now menacing Soviet Union.
If Australia had been given command of the Southwest Pacific theater, if she had been allowed to conquer and retain at least a portion of the East Indies, and if an Australian voice had been permitted in the highest strategic councils of the Western Allies, Australia's estrangement from Britain and America probably would not have occurred. On the other hand, the sensitivities of Australia were of no great concern to statesmen and high commanders in Washington and London as long as Australia's national security was dependent upon the Anglo-American alliance. Therefore it was unlikely during World War II that Australia would have been able to gain leverage by brief control of the Southwest Pacific theater that could have been translated into more satisfactory postwar relations with America and Britain or into large territorial spoils in the Pacific after the war.
This eventuality almost took place, and in retrospect some members of the American high command believed it would have been the wiser course. Before the possibilities and limitations of other options are considered, the evolution of the actual decision on the reconquest of the Philippines will be traced briefly.
When General MacArthur escaped from Corregidor in March 1942 and made his way through Japanese lines to Australia, his train stopped for a short time at Adelaide while en route to Melbourne, where he was to establish his new allied theater headquarters. At the Adelaide railroad station he proclaimed to a group of correspondents and onlookers that President Roosevelt had ordered him to go to Australia “for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary object of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.”5 All across the free world his words “I shall return” made headlines, although there was no provision at that time in the plans of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff nor the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff for MacArthur to lead, as he assumed, a future counteroffensive to liberate the Philippines employing largely American Army ground and air units.
Indeed, since the early editions, in the 1920s, of War Plan Orange, the American contingency plan for a possible conflict with Japan would be primarily naval. They envisioned the decisive drive following a westward course from Pearl Harbor toward Tokyo, spearheaded by United States Navy and Marine forces operating east and north of the Philippines.
Because plans during World War II for the final defeat of Japan were not seriously considered by the Joint Chiefs and their subordinate planning committees until late 1943 when the offensive momentum and the superiority in men and materiel had definitely shifted to the allied side in the Pacific, MacArthur's pledge to return to the Philippines went unchallenged for quite a while in official strategic planning sessions in Washington. By the spring of 1944, however, allied offensives were penetrating deep within Japan's West Pacific defense perimeter, and a decision was obviously needed on the future axis of advance to Japan.
The Joint Staff Planners, the Joint Strategic Survey Committee, and the Joint War Plans Committee, each consisting of senior Army and Navy officers and reporting to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had narrowed the choices to southern Formosa, Amoy and its vicinity on the coast of China, or Luzon in the northern Philippines as the most strategically important and logistically reasonable targets prior to direct operations against the main Japanese home islands. The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved directives that spring for the autumn advance of MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area forces into the southern and central Philippines but held in abeyance any decision on where the principal pre-Japan amphibious assault would take place and whether it would be commanded by him or Admiral Nimitz, the head of the Pacific Ocean Areas theater. Admiral King, the chief of naval operations, had long opposed ground operations in the Philippines and warned of a potential bloodbath on Luzon. After disagreeing with King in the formative Joint Chiefs' sessions on Pacific plans and tentatively defending the idea of a MacArthur-led advance to Luzon, by May 1944 General Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff, and General Henry H. Arnold, the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, began to yield somewhat in the months-long debate. They were increasingly inclined to think that the Formosa objective would be obtainable more rapidly and at less cost than Luzon, the most strongly fortified Philippine island.
At Pearl Harbor in late July 1944, Roosevelt, MacArthur, Nimitz, and Admiral William
D. Leahy, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and chief of staff to FDR, conferred on future Pacific strategy. MacArthur was persuasive in arguing that not only strategic but also humanitarian and political factors favored the Luzon target over Formosa. Nimitz thought both should be seized but Luzon first, though King, his superior who was in Washington, was known to oppose adamantly any move into the Philippines. Roosevelt and Leahy returned from the Oahu meeting apparently won over by MacArthur's argument for Luzon, but they did not pressure the Joint Chiefs to accept their views when they returned to the States.
The Joint Chiefs and their planners continued to debate the alternatives until early October when King and his strategic advisers finally concluded that an amphibious assault on Formosa would not be logistically feasible in the near future or even by March 1945, as King had earlier predicted. Thereupon the Joint Chiefs, with presidential approval, issued directives on October 3 to MacArthur authorizing his invasion of Luzon in December and to Nimitz approving his plans to assault Iwo Jima in January and Okinawa in March.
The Joint Chiefs never formally cancelled the Formosa plan, but it was not seriously considered again – nor was the plan to establish an Amoy beachhead revived. The Luzon, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa operations all had to be postponed considerably because of the logistical shortages and delay in securing Leyte in the central Philippines.
As King had predicted, the Luzon campaign, which lasted from January to August 1945 with a large Japanese force still battling by V-J Day, became the costliest operation of the Pacific war in terms of American ground forces killed in combat. In fact, two of the four bloodiest campaigns of the war with Japan in numbers of United States troops killed in ground action were in the Philippines: Luzon, 8,200; Okinawa, 7,400; Iwo Jima, 6,900; Leyte, 3,500.
If the Joint Chiefs could have foreseen that Luzon's liberation would be far longer and bloodier than the four-week campaign MacArthur promised, it is quite doubtful that they would have selected Luzon over Formosa (or Amoy). In fact, they probably would have terminated the northward advance in the Southwest Pacific theater with MacArthur's conquest of Netherlands New Guinea in July 1944.
A number of additional factors might have led them to decide to bypass that archipelago. First, if MacArthur had not been in a position to influence the President and the Joint Chiefs in decision-making in 1944, King surely would have gotten his way on enveloping the Philippines. The absence of MacArthur's input at this stage of the war would have come about either because he had been taken prisoner in the Philippines in early 1942, he had been killed during his long, perilous journey by PT-boat and B-17 from Corregidor to Australia that March, or he had been relieved as Southwest Pacific theater commander after suffering another defeat in his next campaign, which was the hard-fought six-month operation to recapture Papua, New Guinea.
Second, the transfer of the bulk of United States ground, air, and sea forces from the Southwest Pacific to the Central Pacific after the disappointing Papuan struggle, along with additional shipping and service forces for Nimitz's theater, may have made it possible by autumn of 1944, after the Marianas had been secured, to move directly on to Formosa without capturing Luzon first.
Third, an earlier end to the war in Europe, perhaps in the fall of 1944, would have permitted the redeployment of American forces from the European and Mediterranean theaters to buttress a Central Pacific forces' assault on Formosa. Such a massive shift of power might have made possible the bypassing of both Formosa and Luzon and, instead, an assault of Kyushu directly, as Marshall at one time suggested during the actual Joint Chiefs' discussions in 1944.
If there had been no allied invasion of the Philippine Islands, the consequences for the Southwest Pacific Area, the allied theater that MacArthur headed, would have been far-reaching during both the wartime period and the postwar era. As earlier suggested, there would undoubtedly have been no operations by Southwest Pacific forces above the equator. Most of the American units would have been transferred to the Central Pacific command. There would have been no conquest of Morotai in the Halmaheras by MacArthur's troops nor of the Palau Islands by Nimitz's forces, since both advances were planned solely in support of future Philippine assaults. Deleting the Palaus operations would have meant the battle for Peleliu, one of the costliest and strategically most needless operations of the Pacific war, would not have occurred.
It is likely that MacArthur would have been named in mid-1944 or earlier as commander of all Army forces in the war with Japan and Nimitz as head of all Navy and Marine elements in that conflict, which was accomplished in fact in the spring of 1945 by a Joint Chiefs' directive in preparation for the impending invasion of Japan. Australian General Thomas Blamey, who actually headed allied ground forces in the Southwest Pacific, probably would have been appointed to supreme command of that theater once its principal allied units were Australian. Under MacArthur they had been relegated to fighting mop-up actions and eliminating bypassed enemy garrisons south of the equator by 1944. Now, however, the Australians, who exhibited great interest in postwar territorial expansion in the Southwest Pacific areas that Japan and the Netherlands had formerly possessed, would have probably launched invasions of several Dutch East Indies islands west of New Guinea, especially Java and Borneo.
The postwar Indonesian nationalist movement would have been confronted with not only Dutch but also Australian resistance, possibly resulting in a complex three-cornered revolutionary war. Elements of the British-controlled Southeast Asia Command of Admiral Mountbatten, which actually first engaged the Indonesian rebels in armed clashes in the fall of 1945 before the Dutch returned, would have become entangled in even more fighting if the Australians were occupying some key East Indies islands, notably Java. Of course, there is the possibility that combined operations by the western forces might have suppressed the Indonesian revolution at least temporarily.
The impact on the Philippines would have been significant if that archipelago had been bypassed in 1944-45, but it would not have been altogether as negative as MacArthur portrayed it gloomily at the Pearl Harbor Conference. When allied operations neared the islands, Japanese vessels carried many American prisoners of war from the Philippines to Formosa, Korea, Manchuria, and Japan. These “hell ships” got their nickname because many of them were sunk and thousands of Americans were killed when Pacific Fleet submarines and carrier-based aircraft attacked them at sea. The Japanese butchery of American prisoners as well as Filipino civilians would have been less, since the atrocities usually were set off in waves of panic when the guards got news of an approaching allied invasion armada. One of the worst incidents was in December 1944 on Palawan Island in the southern Philippines where over 140 American veterans were ignited with gasoline or machine-gunned to death. During the savage battle for the city of Manila in February and March 1945, Japanese defenders of Intramuros, the old Spanish Walled City, panicked and slaughtered Filipino civilians caught in that area of central Manila, the final toll of atrocities approaching 60,000.
In Manila, as well as in countless towns and villages across the Philippine Islands, the devastation of battle was widespread as both sides locked in one fierce battle after another. American artillery fire and aerial bombing, including the first use of napalm, produced appalling casualties among civilians caught in the path of the fighting. It would be many years before the economic, social, and physical reconstruction and rehabilitation of the Philippines undid the ravages of war, which ranked among the worst suffered by any country in the Second World War. MacArthur's return and all the fighting it symbolized surely were mixed blessings to a land and people already poor and oppressed from nearly three years of Japanese occupation. The liberation of the Philippines, like the rescue of South Korea later, was attainable at a terrible price for those liberated.
As was true of other Asian peoples whose countries were occupied by the Japanese, the Filipinos at first appreciated the conquerors' slogan of “Asia for the Asiatics,” Tokyo's talk of a Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, and the national independence that Japan promised. As the occupation wore on, however, the Filipinos became disillusioned with the proffered good intentions of the Japanese, finding them to be ruthless, tyrannical overlords bent on keeping the Filipinos in colonial bondage. If the Philippines had not been liberated by MacArthur's troops, the collaborationist regime that the Japanese established in the archipelago's national and provincial offices would have become more entrenched, but it also would have been increasingly challenged by a growing guerrilla movement.
The resistance movement in the Philippines actually became one of the largest and most effective in any Axis-occupied countries, reaching its peak as the invaluable right arm of MacArthur's regular units after they arrived in 1944-45. Without such an invasion the allied shipments of arms and supplies to the rebel units operating on a considerable number of the 7,100 islands of the Philippines, as well as the important intelligence the guerrillas provided the allies about enemy forces' dispositions and plans, would have continued apace. Indeed, the allied logistical input to the resistance probably would have been far greater than actually occurred in order to keep Filipino morale high and imprisoned American soldiers and civilian internees hopeful.
At the end of World War II, possibly before any American officials returned, there would have probably been open fighting between the collaborationists and the guerrillas, culminating in a civil war that would have led to America's postponement of the independence (promised in the mid-1930s) to take place in July 1946. Whatever element might have emerged dominant in Philippine politics after the internal strife, most Filipinos would have experienced estrangement from the United States for a host of reasons, including the failure to defend the islands in 1941-42, the bypassing of the islands in 1944-45, and the part, whatever it might be, of America in the Philippines' postwar turmoil. In truth, whether MacArthur had returned or not, the United States would surely have been cast in the role of scapegoat for most of the woes the Filipinos suffered during and after the Second World War. Such was the almost universal fate of western imperial powers that attempted to return in whatever manner to their former colonies, so powerful was the impetus of post-1945 nationalism in Africa, Asia, and the West Pacific.
On the positive side regarding the reconquest of the Philippines, it must be pointed out that the assets of not bypassing the archipelago proved to be significant. Over 438,000 Japanese troops were killed or became prisoners of war (wounded data are not known) during the Philippine campaign of 1944-45, including the destruction of fifteen first-line army divisions. Japanese air strength had been reduced by thousands of planes and crews, while the battle for Leyte Gulf and lesser naval actions in Philippine waters had left the Japanese Combined Fleet virtually non-existent. In other words, much of the Japanese ground, air, and naval strength that otherwise might have been deployed against Nimitz's Central Pacific operations on Iwo Jima and Okinawa or against the projected invasion of Kyushu in November 1945, Operation Olympic, was wiped out in the Philippine operations.
By May 1945, American forces held nearly all the base areas that would be required to mount Olympic. By August, base development was well advanced all through the Philippines and the redeployment of American forces from the European theater to the islands was underway. American planes now had dozens of excellent air bases in the Philippines to interdict Japanese lines of communication in the South China Sea and further strangle Japan's economic support from Southeast Asia as well as cut off further enemy reinforcements to the East Indies. Finally, if thousands of Filipinos and Americans died during the liberation operations, at least by June 1945 millions of Filipinos and thousands of civilian internees had been freed, while law and order had been restored in most areas of the Philippines. The liabilities of retaking the Philippines were many and serious, but the assets were by no means inconsiderable. Liberating or bypassing the islands, however, meant dilemmas for the United States during World War II and long afterward.
If there had been no reconquest of the Philippines, it is highly probable that the Joint Chiefs would have authorized Nimitz to launch assaults on southern Formosa and the Amoy area during the fall of 1944. As already mentioned, the decision to bypass the Philippines would have released many of the American ground, sea, and air units of the Southwest Pacific theater for such Central Pacific invasions. The Pacific command organization would have been revised to accommodate MacArthur as commander of Army forces. No unity of command had ever been attempted in the war against Japan primarily because of inter-service frictions and the Navy's deep-seated opposition to any control of large naval forces by MacArthur. How a reorganized command arrangement for the Formosa-Amoy operations might have functioned is hard to imagine, though problems in communication and coordination would have undoubtedly been monumental. General Joseph W. Stilwell, the China-Burma-India commander and chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek since the spring of 1942, was relieved in the autumn of 1944 and later headed the United States Tenth Army in the final stage of the conquest of Okinawa. It boggles the imagination to picture a command structure for the Formosa -Amoy operations that might have had Nimitz as theater commander and Pacific Fleet chief, MacArthur as overall head of Army ground and air forces, and Stilwell as commander of one of the invading armies. The chaotic command arrangement in Burma might have appeared tranquil in comparison.
In early August 1944, MacArthur sent one of his strongest messages to the Joint Chiefs (through Marshall) protesting an invasion of Formosa. He maintained: “The Formosa campaign itself can not be supported logistically without adequate bases in the Philippines. .. . An attempt to execute a great campaign in the far reaches of the Pacific without the establishment of adequate bases would be fraught with the gravest danger of disaster, which, if incurred, would greatly lengthen the war and multiply losses.”6 The Joint Chiefs were well acquainted with MacArthur's skill in using hyperbole to support his arguments, but this time the Southwest Pacific general demonstrated a foresight that came only much later to his superiors.
Even though Vice Admiral Marc A. Mitscher's Fast Carrier Task Force had the capability by the autumn of 1944 of launching over 900 planes for a single mission, the number of Japanese airfields within range of southern Formosa and Amoy was enormous. Thousands of land-based aircraft could have been dispatched against Mitscher and later against the invasion armadas. In previous campaigns in both Nimitz's and MacArthur's theaters, allied counteroffensives had enjoyed aerial supremacy, in part because of the long distances from major enemy airfields. Also, in the Southwest Pacific campaigns, allied ground operations had been supported by General Kenney's powerful land-based Fifth Air Force. In a Formosa-Amoy campaign, for the first time since early 1942, the airpower advantage might lie with the Japanese.
The proximity of the projected combat zone to other Japanese concentrations of military strength, such as in northern Formosa, southeastern China, the Ryukyus, Luzon, and even Kyushu, meant also that not only could Japanese air units be reinforced readily but also enemy ground and naval forces could be built up and resupplied more quickly than the allies could mount in the Formosa-Amoy operations. Even if lodgments were attained by the allied amphibious forces, the battle for Leyte Gulf, the greatest naval engagement of all time, would seem small in comparison to the great sea and air clashes that the Formosa-Amoy assaults would precipitate. The fighting probably would have culminated in the destruction of Japan's Combined Fleet and the backbone of her airpower reserved for defense of the homeland, but the sea and air losses on the allied side would have been horrendous and the allied victory narrow, depending heavily on the vast reserves of American ships and planes that could have eventually been thrown into the fray.
The ground actions would not have remained limited to southern Formosa and the Amoy region despite King's planners predicting otherwise. Instead they would have led to long and costly operations to take the rest of Formosa, which would be necessary to protect the B-29 bases to be built on the south end of the island and to prevent Japanese spoiling attacks and raids on the allied build-up and base construction for a future invasion of Japan. American Marines had secured the Empress Augusta Bay area of Bougainville in 1943, and they and Australian relief units had expanded the perimeter somewhat; the bulk of the island, however, had been left in Japanese control without serious menace to allied activities in the bay area. But Formosa was a quite different situation; the northern part, if it remained in enemy hands, could be easily reinforced from China or the nearby Ryukyus, in contrast to Bougainville, which was soon isolated.
The ground forces required for a campaign on Formosa would have been enormous, and very difficult to sustain logistically. The Okinawa operation affords some basis for projecting strength and loss data. Okinawa comprised 454 square miles and was defended by 135,000 Japanese troops. It took 176,000 United States Army and Marine personnel to secure the island. Japanese ground losses were 128,000 killed or captured, while the American troop casualties were 40,000 killed, wounded, or missing. Formosa consisted of 13,087 square miles, and, with reinforcements pouring in from the Japanese strongholds nearby, the defending force could have been quickly built up to at least 350,000, comparable to the strength of the Japanese army on Luzon. Surely two American armies would have been necessary to seize Formosa. The forces necessary to secure the Amoy region, as well as the losses incurred, would have been even larger.
More crucial than the expanded fighting on Formosa, the allied forces at Amoy would have become enmeshed in operations on the Chinese mainland. There the Japanese maintained well over half of all the ground forces they had deployed outside the home islands. In the summer and fall of 1944 General Yasuji Okamura, one of Japan's best commanders, led an 820,000-man army in the offensive across south China that overran several B-29 bases and sealed off the Amoy coastal region from the main Chinese forces east of Chungking. The allied beachhead at Amoy could not have expected help from the Chinese armies inland, so it is likely more allied troops would have been poured into the Amoy region to expand the perimeter and make it usable for new B-29 airfields and base preparations for mounting an invasion of Japan. In short, the Formosa-Amoy venture would have entangled the Central Pacific forces in costly, tangential operations, and Nimitz, the theater commander, would have come to view the escalating ground commitment with the same frustration Brer Rabbit must have felt when he got all four hands and feet stuck in the tar baby.
While the Formosa-Amoy operations undoubtedly would have been the bloodiest of the Pacific war short of an invasion of Japan, assaults on those two areas would also have meant that there would have been no invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, two of the costliest Pacific campaigns. Nimitz simply would not have had the manpower or materiel to spare for such ventures, especially since the shortages of shipping and service troops experienced by Central and Southwest Pacific theaters throughout the war would have worsened with the Formosa-Amoy escalations. On the positive side, too, the securing of Formosa and Amoy would have given the allies a strategic chokepoint on the Japanese line of communications to Southeast Asia, cutting off more effectively the critical supply of strategic raw materials like rubber, oil, and bauxite from Malaya, Borneo, Sumatra, and Java.
The establishment of an allied beachhead around Amoy, whether or not it was enlarged appreciably, would have been a tremendous boost to Chinese morale, which after the Japanese offensive in the summer of 1944 had drooped badly and had led to talk of negotiations for a separate peace with Japan. On the other hand, the presence of an American army in Fukien province (Amoy) at the end of World War II might have provided the impetus the strong China Bloc in America wanted to justify intervention in the looming Chinese civil war.
The Joint Chiefs had initially considered possibilities other than invasions of the Philippines, Formosa, and the Amoy region. Some attention had been devoted to a direct assault on Kyushu or even Honshu, but neither Nimitz nor MacArthur, when queried by the Joint Chiefs, believed an invasion of the Japanese home islands would be feasible without a large and secure base of operations to the south as well as land-based air support. The operations in the Aleutians by the Japanese in 1942 and the Americans in 1943 were fraught with so many weather-related problems that no earnest consideration was given to mounting an axis of advance by way of the Kuriles and Hokkaido, especially since repeated efforts to get the Soviet Union to permit American planes to use its Siberian bases had been to no avail. In retrospect, it seems the northern assault route might have been given more attention; it appears ironic that the war began with the Pearl Harbor attack force taking advantage of the North Pacific, but that same avenue of approach to Japan later was discarded as laden with too many meteorological and logistical problems.
Other options that were discussed and dismissed were bringing about the capitulation of Japan by accelerating the blockade of the home islands or the strategic bombing program, with some American Navy and Army Air Forces leaders convinced that a ground assault was not necessary if the naval and air forces were augmented, used more efficiently, and employed patiently in a strategy of attrition. In the end, of course, Japan's actual surrender resulted from two developments that the Joint Chiefs and their planners had not considered prior to the final weeks of the war: the use of atomic bombs and the entry into the Pacific conflict of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the best hope of all for an earlier end to the war with Japan probably would have been more attention and better diplomacy devoted to engaging the Soviets against the Japanese long before 1945. In turn, the price for the West would have been an even greater Soviet presence in the Far East than was yielded in the Yalta Agreements. A most significant consequence would have been that the occupation of Japan, which became a virtually all-American show under MacArthur, would have been administered by allied zones as in Germany and undoubtedly with equally frustrating conditions for the conquered and the conquerors.
1 Louis Morton, Strategy and Command: The First Two Years. United States Army in World War II: The War in the Pacific (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1962), 21.
2 Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt to Sec. of War Henry L. Stimson, Dec. 30, 1941, Box 5, Aid to MacArthur folder, Harry L. Hopkins Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.
3 Roosevelt to General MacArthur, Feb. 9, 1942, record group 2, GHQ USAFFE records, MacArthur Memorial Archives, Norfolk, VA.
4 Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 172-173.
5 London Times, March 21, 1942.
6 MacArthur to Gen. George C. Marshall, Aug. 3, 1944, in Grace P. Hayes, The History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in World War II: The War Against Japan (Annapolis, MD.: Naval Institute Press, 1982), 611.