While Bill Halsey sat out a round and fought severe dermatitis, other battles were raging over the conduct of the war. How was command of a global war effort to be divided up on land and sea? Should President Roosevelt appoint one supreme military chief? And despite the commitment to Germany First with America’s British and Russian allies, how would this play out in practice against the pressing needs in the Pacific?
Admiral King had laid out his preferred strategy in a memo to General Marshall several weeks before King became CNO and COMINCH. He had remained adamant at every turn about his initial charge to Nimitz to maintain the Hawaii/West Coast–Australia sea-lanes at all costs. Just how, Marshall now asked, did King propose to accomplish this?
In but one example of the communications between army and navy this early in the war, Marshall’s request took a week to travel from his office, then in the Munitions Building, to King’s office in the adjacent Navy Department Building less than two blocks away. It finally arrived just one day before the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS)—still only Marshall, King, and Arnold—was to hold only its third meeting since the Arcadia Conference six weeks before. But in characteristic fashion, King did not hesitate or plead for more time. Instead, he dictated a reply, approved a final draft, and had copies distributed at the JCS meeting the next day.
“The general scheme or concept of operations,” King wrote, “is not only to protect the lines of communications with Australia but, in so doing, to set up ‘strong points’ from which a step-by-step general advance can be made through the New Hebrides, Solomons, and the Bismarck Archipelago.” Marshall immediately seized on the words “general advance.” The Japanese were rushing toward Australia, Churchill was bemoaning the fall of Singapore as akin to the end of Western civilization, and both Roosevelt and Churchill had just agreed to a Germany First strategy. How could King even consider a “general advance” in the Pacific?
But King was emphatic about how he could and would accomplish it. Using marines as the spear point, King intended to seize and occupy strategic positions along the all-important Hawaii–Australia lifeline, not only securing the route to Australia but also establishing staging points from which to strike generally northwest from that line. The army would follow to garrison the acquired strongholds.1
Three days later, King repeated his plan for Roosevelt, who was trying to find some way to bolster Churchill’s momentary gloom. King reminded FDR that the United States was, almost by default and with British acquiescence, assuming chief responsibility for Pacific operations, the British having been generally driven west of the Malay Peninsula, save Australia and New Zealand. King strongly concurred with Roosevelt’s previously expressed view that with limited resources and an almost unlimited geography over which to fight, the United States should determine “a very few lines of military endeavor and concentrate our efforts on these lines.” Those lines might well change in the future, King said, but they “should be kept at a very few.” (Emphasis in original in both cases.)
The most important line of the “very few” to be allocated to the Pacific was support for “Australasia”—the continent and its northern approaches—by keeping Samoa, Fiji, and New Caledonia as strongpoints along the Hawaii–Australia lifeline, securing the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) and Ellice Islands (now Tuvalu) as additional strongpoints, and then driving northwest from there into the Solomons, including an island called Guadalcanal.
“Such a line of operations will be offensive rather than passive,” King maintained, “and will draw Japanese forces there to oppose it, thus relieving pressure elsewhere, whether in Hawaii, ABDA area [the Southwest Pacific], Alaska, or even India.” This became “an integrated, general plan of operations” that King summarized like this: “Hold Hawaii, Support Australasia, Drive northwestward from New Hebrides.”2
Roosevelt seized on King’s plan and passed it on to Churchill as a way to encourage him to think that, Singapore aside, all was not lost in the Pacific. Churchill fretted that any American offensive in the Pacific would come at a cost to operations against Germany, but Roosevelt reassured him of the overall commitment to Germany First, even if some resources, particularly American contributions to air operations against Germany during 1942, would inevitably be diverted to the Pacific.
King’s general operational strategy for offensive operations in the Pacific—as opposed to mere defensive containment—was thus adopted, even though Roosevelt would vacillate on it depending on his audience. “Although it was not at once apparent (perhaps not even to King),” King’s principal biographer wrote with some hyperbole, “King had embarked upon the most important contribution he would make to victory in the Second World War.”3
King and Marshall’s next task was to divide the vast Pacific into operational areas with some measure of unified command between the army and navy. Since both men were initially much more inclined to send each other memos rather than walk next door and knock, this was easier said than done. And it complicated matters further that one of those watching how big a piece of the pie he would get was Douglas MacArthur.
Roosevelt’s recall of MacArthur from the Philippines had been premised in part on the need to put him in a larger role—at least that was the perception trumpeted in both the American and Australian press. The general’s “I shall return” remark upon reaching Australia fit the situation, as well as his persona, perfectly. Marshall further supported this image by arranging for MacArthur to be given the one military award the general truly coveted, the Medal of Honor, so that he might emulate his father, who had won it for his reckless dash up Missionary Ridge almost eighty years before.
Marshall, of course, had a more practical motive than merely massaging the general’s ego. “I submit the recommendation to you,” Marshall wrote Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, “not only because I am certain that General MacArthur is deserving of the honor, but also because I am certain that this action will meet with popular approval, both within and without the armed forces, and will have a constructive morale value.” Having played a large role in both rescuing and elevating MacArthur, Marshall remained convinced that MacArthur’s “dominating character is needed down there to make the Navy keep up their job in spite of rows which we shall have between them.”4
But Marshall had also by now had enough exposure to King to know that he had no intention of turning over command of navy ships in the Pacific to MacArthur or anyone else. Nimitz was CINCPAC, and that was that. In fact, far from merely keeping up their job, King had just outlined how the navy would take the lead.
Yet when Marshall’s war plans chief, Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower, drew up the army’s Pacific overview, he tentatively assigned the entire Pacific, from the Philippines to Samoa and west of 170° west longitude (decidedly east of New Zealand), to MacArthur. This left the navy idling around Hawaii and the West Coast and implied that MacArthur would command the navy and marine forces that King proposed to deploy in support of his pronounced offensive strategy. King strongly opposed Eisenhower’s division, and Marshall agreed to revisit the map of the Pacific.
What’s more, King advocated unity of command at the tactical level in each theater of operations, but wanted strategic decisions to be made only at the Joint Chiefs level and then transmitted from Marshall and King to their respective commands. When adopted, this structure had the effect of making the Joint Chiefs the supreme military authority and Marshall and King the undisputed heads of their services subject only to the president.
So the three chiefs of staff—Marshall, King, and Arnold, the latter subservient to Marshall—with Roosevelt’s ultimate blessing set about carving the Pacific into four areas of tactical command. In the Southwest Pacific Area, which included Australia, New Guinea, and the Netherlands East Indies, MacArthur was designated commander in chief, Southwest Pacific (COMSOWESPAC), over all army and navy forces of the Allied powers in that theater, principally the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, effective April 18, 1942. As CINCPAC, Nimitz retained command over all units of the principal American fleet should it sail into the Southwest Pacific Area (as it had at Coral Sea), as well as being the commander in chief of all Allied army and navy forces in the remaining Pacific Ocean Area (CINCPOA).
As the final lines were drawn, Marshall wanted one seemingly minor change: to push MacArthur’s area northward from the East Indies to include the Philippines, doing so, he said, for “psychological reasons.” At this point in the war, it seemed a relatively innocuous move, and King agreed to the concession. What it did, of course, was inadvertently sanction MacArthur’s determination to return to the Philippines whether or not such action was in the best interests of wider strategic concerns.
Nimitz’s Pacific Ocean Area was further divided into the North Pacific Area, north of 42° north latitude; the South Pacific Area, south of the equator and east of 160° east longitude; and the remaining swath of the core Central Pacific Area. One problem that would soon arise was that the dividing line between the Southwest Pacific (MacArthur) and the South Pacific (Nimitz) areas along 160° east longitude ran right through Guadalcanal. The broader issues of independent areas of command and “MacArthur’s Navy,” as well as that of the Philippines, would reverberate throughout the war.5