Buna had been a challenge for MacArthur, who rarely fired a subordinate. Harding’s dismissal was the exception, not the rule. MacArthur shaped his command’s strategy, but he listened closely and usually followed the suggestions of his senior subordinates on how they wanted to deploy their forces. Once he had in place commanders whom he trusted, he only interfered to move up a timetable or to chide them for not moving quickly. His was not a hidden hand, but it certainly was a light one. In this, he and Franklin Roosevelt were much alike.
While Roosevelt was never removed from the war’s planning, he only intervened when George Marshall or Ernie King attempted to shift its focus—he had insisted on Operation Torch in the face of their opposition and ignored their fears that his relationship with Churchill would divert U.S. resources into unwanted theaters. He fretted when the navy proved incapable of stopping the Japanese along Iron Bottom Sound, and he sought Marshall’s assurance that MacArthur was doing everything he could to help Ghormley. Then, in October 1942, with the Marines barely holding on at Guadalcanal, he approved the replacement of Ghormley with Admiral William “Bull” Halsey. But even this was not enough. One week after Halsey’s appointment, after rifling through dispatches from the Solomons, Roosevelt boiled over, shouting at aides that the JCS should make certain that “every possible weapon gets into that area to hold Guadalcanal.”
Roosevelt had reason to worry. Just prior to Ghormley’s relief, the Japanese succeeded in landing fifteen thousand additional troops on the island. Seven thousand of them hacked their way through the jungle and, on October 24, attacked Vandegrift’s lines along the east bank of the Lunga River. The Japanese were finally repulsed on October 26, with fifteen hundred enemy corpses laid out in front of the American position. That same day, a U.S. task force commanded by Admiral Thomas Kinkaid forced Japanese carriers coming south toward the Santa Cruz Islands back north, though the Japanese sank the carrier Hornet and pummeled the Enterprise. The Japanese navy fought with grim obstinacy, sending the “Tokyo Express” relief convoys down “the Slot” every night. By early November, they had successfully reinforced their Guadalcanal positions, forcing the Marines into a series of costly attacks on their lines. In Rabaul, Admiral Yamamoto decided that he could retake Henderson Field and win the battle if he could find a way to bring an additional twelve thousand Japanese troops onto the island. He sent a well-protected convoy into the Slot to clear the way for the reinforcements on November 12.
Desperate to stop the Japanese, the newly appointed Halsey scratched together a force of two heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, and eight destroyers. The resulting series of night attacks—the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal—was a bloodbath. Only a single American cruiser and one lone destroyer were able to escape the maelstrom, and task force commanders Daniel Callaghan and Norman Scott were killed. Vice Admiral Hiroaki Abe, scarred by the carnage, ordered his ships to withdraw. Abe’s decision was the battle’s tipping point, for the Japanese thereafter proved unable to appreciably reinforce their Guadalcanal garrison. At the end of December, as Eichelberger’s Diggers and GIs were preparing their last assault at Buna, the Japanese high command decided that Guadalcanal would be abandoned. But the decision’s aftermath showed that the Japanese refused to be pried from the rest of the Solomon Islands—they hurled aircraft at Guadalcanal, as if protesting the American victory, launching hundreds of raids. Despite these efforts, the Japanese had lost Guadalcanal. Eichelberger chronicled the lesson thus learned: “Sometimes just plain stubbornness wins the battle that awareness and wisdom might have lost.” The same was true at Buna.
It was not enough for Eichelberger to insist that courage alone would win battles—that was the Japanese way of war. So after the failure of an all-out frontal assault that he had ordered for December 5, Eichelberger told the Aussies to probe the Japanese lines and destroy strongpoints one by one. This knee-buckling fight pitted small units against each other within grenade range. The tactic worked: Gona was captured after hand-to-hand fighting on December 8. But the toughest fight of all came at Sanananda, at the center of the beachhead, where the Japanese had constructed a gun-bristling roadblock. On Christmas Day 1942, eight companies of the 127th Infantry clawed their way into the Government Gardens section west of Buna and headed to Sanananda, while the Australians broke up concentrations of Japanese defenders near Sanananda Point. The bedraggled U.S. 163rd Regiment finished the battle, pinning a last-gasp group of Japanese against the coast.
The final accounting showed that the Japanese suffered 8,000 dead, and although Allied casualties were not as severe, they were daunting: Nearly 35,000 Australians and Americans fought at Gona, Buna, and Sanananda, with nearly one-third of them dead, wounded, or incapacitated by disease. The 32nd Division was eviscerated, with 586 killed in action, 1,954 wounded, and more than 7,000 sick—two-thirds of the division’s strength. To this must be added more than 8,000 Diggers and GIs who suffered from battle fatigue, the highest percentage of any campaign in the war. “I am a reasonably unimaginative man, but Buna is still to me, in retrospect, a nightmare,” Eichelberger said.
The growing lists of dead, wounded, and those taken by disease and the long roll of destroyers, cruisers, and aircraft carriers torn to pieces had a relentlessly bleak effect on Franklin Roosevelt. Even so, the president didn’t slow his routine or cease cultivating his political standing with the American people. His intervention in the Guadalcanal campaign when he insisted that more transports be sent to the battle theater was inspired by a gnawing public desire for more victories and public worry over the growing casualty lists. George Marshall had worked to relieve the public pressure. When the anti-Roosevelt Republican press speculated, incorrectly, that the president had supported the navy’s Guadalcanal operation over MacArthur’s at Buna, Marshall briefed Henry Stimson on why the Pacific was divided into two commands to begin with. Roosevelt had nothing to do with it, the army chief said. The decision was made by the Joint Chiefs. “I doubt if the President even knew of the subdivision at the time it was made,” he pointed out.
Marshall was also quick to defend his Southwest Pacific commander, whose public statements on Buna highlighted the limited resources the region’s forces worked with. MacArthur’s comments, Marshall said, shouldn’t be interpreted as an attack on the president; MacArthur wasn’t criticizing Roosevelt to promote his political future any more than Roosevelt was keeping MacArthur undersupplied to make certain the general had none. But Secretary Stimson was skeptical; MacArthur’s high-profile complaints kept his name in circulation as a possible Roosevelt successor or replacement. Stimson also realized that Marshall defended MacArthur because the commander was a lever against Ernie King and needed little guidance.
In fact, MacArthur was much less of a headache for Marshall than other American commanders, such as Eisenhower subordinates George Patton and Mark Clark. Patton, a bombastic showman, cultivated public acclaim and feuded with nearly everyone he met. His ego might have been unrivaled—except for Clark’s. Despite being Eisenhower’s best friend, Clark trailed a coterie of worshipful reporters and regularly disparaged anyone whose fighting qualities garnered public acclaim. Patton and Clark weren’t the only problems Marshall had. Cultivating public attention was a virus among American commanders, sparking constant interservice and inter-Allied feuding: King despised Patton, Hap Arnold couldn’t bring himself to speak to King, and Eisenhower thought British commander Bernard Law Montgomery “conceited.” The animus didn’t end there: Patton held all British commanders in disdain, Clark stewed over the headlines given his peers, and General Omar Bradley plotted ways to take advantage of Patton’s antics. Meanwhile, General Terry de la Mesa Allen, one of the best American combat leaders, described Bradley as “a phony Abraham Lincoln.”
Among all these interpersonal rivalries, MacArthur’s efforts to push himself into the limelight stand out. He failed to publicize his subordinates’ demonstrations of perseverance and valor. For example, when the Australians caved in the right flank of the Japanese position at Buna, MacArthur’s headquarters remained silent, and when Eichelberger’s soldiers were assailing the Triangle (rotting Japanese corpses were piled so high that the defenders wore gas masks), MacArthur issued a Christmas circular to the press: “On Christmas Day our activities were limited to routine safety precautions. Divine services were held.” MacArthur also tended to exaggerate his command’s strategic successes: Two weeks after the Allied assault on the Triangle, as Eichelberger gathered his soldiers for a final push, MacArthur’s headquarters told the public that Sanananda “has now been completely enveloped. A remnant of the enemy’s force is entrenched there and faces certain destruction.” It wasn’t true. The Sanananda position had not been enveloped, and several thousand Japanese defenders—not a “remnant”—remained.
What was so surprising about the releases is that they were so unnecessary. The American people didn’t want their soldiers in divine services, but wanted them in battle. The issue here is not whether MacArthur was courageous, but whether he was honest. His press releases were datelined from Buna, but they were written in Port Moresby. Such duplicity embittered his relationship with Eichelberger. In Eichelberger’s letters to his wife, Emmalina (the letters were published after the war under the title Dear Miss Em), he paints a damning portrait of MacArthur during the Buna fight. At the same moment that MacArthur was issuing a release that his forces were engaged in “mopping up” operations in New Guinea (in mid-January 1943), Eichelberger was preparing for the final assault on Sanananda, a headlong clash that lasted for eight days and only concluded with the elimination of the last Japanese stronghold. MacArthur praised Eichelberger in a personal letter, awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross, bragged about him to visitors to his headquarters, but was irritated when Eichelberger was featured in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post and Life. “Do you realize I could reduce you to the grade of colonel and send you home?” he asked, but then relented: “Well, I won’t do it.” Eichelberger later told a friend at the War Department that he would rather have the friend “slip a rattlesnake in my pocket than have you give me any publicity.”
But Eichelberger was a lot like Eisenhower. He complained about MacArthur in one breath, then praised him in the next. MacArthur is “a fascinating person and an inspiring leader,” he told “Miss Em,” but added that the commander “knew nothing of the jungle and how one fights there.” Eichelberger resented being named with eleven others in the citation awarding him the Distinguished Service Cross (he thought he should have been singled out). He also felt slighted when MacArthur sidelined his nomination for the Medal of Honor, though the nomination (in effect a self-nomination—to spite MacArthur) never gained steam at the War Department. Eichelberger’s complaints about his commander reflect poorly on MacArthur, but they were hardly unprecedented. As Eichelberger was simmering about MacArthur in the wake of Buna, his buddy George Patton was fuming about Eisenhower in North Africa: “Ike is more British than the British and is putty in their hands,” he confided to his diary. “Oh, God, for John J. Pershing.”
These personality tussles found their way into the War Department, where the petty interservice and interpersonal jealousies of the war were fought and refought. But there was no contest more bitter than that fought over George Kenney’s victory at the Bismarck Sea. In February 1943, as the dead were still being buried at Buna, the Japanese attempted to contest control of central New Guinea by sending a convoy of eight destroyers and eight transports carrying six thousand soldiers into Wau, on the Huon Gulf, where the Australian 17th Brigade was building an airfield. Back in Port Moresby, Charles Willoughby warned MacArthur and Kenney of the move, and reconnaissance aircraft were put into the air south of Rabaul to scout out the Japanese convoy. Kenney also shuttled over 150 aircraft into central New Guinea’s airfields and put aircraft stationed at Port Moresby and Milne Bay on alert. When several B-24s sighted the Japanese convoy on March 1, Kenney ordered twenty-eight B-17s over the Bismarck Sea to intercept it. The attacks sank a transport, damaged two others, and left one other dead in the water. The next day, Kenney committed thirteen B-17s, thirty-one B-25s, twelve A-20 light bombers, twenty-eight P-38 fighters, and over a dozen Australian medium bombers to the battle. The attacks were met by Japanese fighters, but by the end of the day, Kenney had scored a decisive victory.
MacArthur received the last of Kenney’s reports on the morning of March 4 (“I have never seen him so jubilant,” the air commander reported) and issued a communiqué based on assessments made by his staff:
The Battle of the Bismarck Sea is now decided. We have achieved a victory of such completeness as to assume the proportions of a major disaster to the enemy. His entire force has been practically destroyed. His naval component consisted of 22 vessels, comprising 12 transports and 10 warships. . . . His air coverage for this naval force has been decimated or dispersed, 55 of his planes having been shot out of combat and many others damaged. His ground forces, estimated at probably 15,000, destined to attack in New Guinea, have been sunk or killed almost to a man.
But there were problems with this report, not the least of which was the double counting by Kenney’s airmen, who believed they had attacked two convoys instead of just one. Such double reporting was not unusual among airmen, who regularly overestimated their kill rate. But Kenney’s reporting was immediately questioned by Navy Secretary Frank Knox, who still doubted that an air force could actually sink ships. He set out to correct the record. Knox’s first move was to fire off a letter to John Curtin: “You must remember that an attack on Australia must be accompanied by a tremendous sea force, and there is no indication of a concentration pointing to that.”
In Brisbane, MacArthur angrily responded that the Battle of the Bismarck Sea was a great victory for Kenney, and that Knox’s navy hadn’t been much help. The Japanese, as he explained to Curtin in a letter (which he then forwarded to Washington), still had “complete control of the sea lanes in the western Pacific and of the outer approaches toward Australia.” Knox directed his staff to give MacArthur’s note to Marshall and to conduct an investigation of Kenney’s claims. The controversy that followed involved Knox, MacArthur, Kenney, King, and Marshall in an ugly interservice battle that rivaled anything else that took place during the war. Marshall could see it coming, but hoped it might be deflected by MacArthur himself—all MacArthur needed to do was agree to investigate Kenny’s figures. Such an investigation, Marshall calculated, would drag on and eventually be forgotten. MacArthur refused. “The bases for the communiqué [of March 7] were official reports from air headquarters to GHQ,” he wrote to Marshall. “Information acquired later from captured documents, photographs, and other data, while making minor changes in [the] original knowledge, showed increased rather than diminished losses. The communiqué as issued is factual.” Back in Washington, Marshall reviewed MacArthur’s cable—and buried it.
Ironically, the payoff of this controversy was that in defending his airmen, MacArthur was transformed into an outspoken airpower advocate. The skeptic became the true believer, the doubter an airpower disciple. George Kenney had his own memories of MacArthur’s support. In the wake of the investigation of the Bismarck Sea claims, Kenney remembered how MacArthur blamed the navy for purposely downplaying his fliers’ victory, essentially repeating the same claims made years before by Billy Mitchell. “MacArthur said he thought the Navy was trying to belittle the whole thing because they weren’t in on it,” he recalled. “He said, ‘You know, it’s against the rules for land-based airplanes to sink ships, especially naval vessels. It’s bad enough for them to sink merchant vessels. They ought to be sunk by battleship gunfire or by submarines. But for airplanes to do it, especially if they aren’t naval airplanes, it’s all wrong.’”
In the midst of his fight—and now back in Brisbane following the Buna victory—MacArthur and his staff focused on Rabaul, issuing a plan (Elkton I) for its capture. Not surprisingly, Kenney’s air force would play a pivotal role in the campaign, primarily because MacArthur’s navy remained modest. Even so, Elkton called for a series of combined arms operations involving dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of soldiers, whose movements would be coordinated over thousands of miles of ocean. The MacArthur plan envisioned the destruction of Rabaul in a series of leaps by his divisions working in parallel with Halsey’s South Pacific command: The Allies would seize New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula, capture Munda Point on New Georgia and airstrips on Bougainville and New Britain, reduce Kavieng on New Ireland, and assault Rabaul itself. Elkton II, the update of Elkton I, was even more detailed. But when the JCS reviewed that plan, they decided that the timetable for Rabaul’s conquest (to begin in May 1943) was too optimistic. MacArthur’s planners reported that ninety-four thousand Japanese were stationed in or near Rabaul, along with 383 land-based planes, four battleships, two aircraft carriers, fourteen cruisers, and forty destroyers. Additionally, the JCS was troubled by MacArthur’s estimates of what it would take to secure a victory; the estimates included five additional divisions, forty-five more air groups, and additional cruisers, destroyers, transports, and landing craft.
MacArthur knew that Elkton II would be a hard sell, particularly given the goals set out at the recently concluded Casablanca Conference, where Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff set out Allied goals for 1943. The Allied leaders ordered an invasion of Sicily, an escalation in the air campaign against Germany, more troops for Burma, and the continued buildup of resources for the invasion of France. Then too, the navy viewed any buildup in the Southwest Pacific as detracting from Chester Nimitz’s planned mid-1943 Central Pacific island-hopping campaign. So when George Marshall suggested that the Pacific commanders send delegations to Washington to hammer out a unified strategy, MacArthur appointed the irascible Richard Sutherland (“the chief insulter of the navy,” as Marshall described him) to lead the Southwest Pacific contingent, along with operations chief Stephen Chamberlin, public relations expert Larry Lehrbas, and George Kenney, the last of whom would be sitting across the table from naval officers who had recently questioned his honesty. Halsey, Nimitz, and King responded in kind. Halsey sent General Millard Harmon and General Nathan Twining to the conference, while Nimitz (“the boss man in the Pacific,” Kenney called him) sent Admiral Raymond Spruance and General Robert Richardson. Finally, King designated Admiral Charles Cooke as his representative—a naval officer who was viewed by one attending officer as even “meaner than King.”
The resulting brouhaha met every expectation: Sutherland was imperious, Cooke insulting, Spruance sullen, Harmon stubborn, and Kenney immovable. What agreement there was came when JCS planners pointed out that the invasion of Sicily and the planned invasion of France meant that MacArthur and Halsey would have to scale back their requests for more ships, aircraft, and soldiers. There weren’t enough to go around, and Europe still came first. On the conference’s last day, George Marshall decided to break the stalemate. After reviewing everyone’s position, he argued that instead of adopting an accelerated approach to the conquest of Rabaul, MacArthur and Halsey should rewrite their plans to reflect their modest resources. Within hours, conference planners agreed to send two additional divisions to MacArthur, with Halsey receiving modest additional air groups.
It was Richard Sutherland who authored the plan for how each commander would use his units, suggesting that to save resources, MacArthur and Halsey orchestrate a series of alternating attacks—MacArthur would seize New Guinea’s Huon Peninsula, after which Halsey would make his move into the central Solomons. MacArthur could then leap forward, followed by Halsey. The only remaining problem, then, was over command. Predictably, King argued that Nimitz be given responsibility for the offensive, while Sutherland argued that Nimitz was too far away to be effective. Marshall’s chief planner, General Thomas Handy, provided a tortured solution, recommending that while operations in both the Southwest and the South Pacific would fall under MacArthur’s control, naval units assigned to him would report to King. With this, the final plan for Rabaul’s conquest was approved on March 28.
But an end to the conference did not mean an end to controversy. Kenney was particularly worried about his meager air force. “Everyone was really stubborn about giving me airplanes, or even replacements for my losses,” he said. “I warned them that if they didn’t keep me going, we would be run out of New Guinea.” Halfway through the conference, Kenney showed up in Hap Arnold’s office to argue his point. “The European show did not like the B-24, or the P-38, or the P-47 Republic Aircraft fighter,” Kenney later remembered. “I told Arnold I was not that particular. All I wanted was something that would fly.” A few days later, Kenney trooped over to the White House for a meeting with Roosevelt, an audacious move designed to rile King and to brag about the victory at the Bismarck Sea. Kenney gave Roosevelt a blow-by-blow account of the battle, then pressed him for more resources. Roosevelt enjoyed the meeting, smiling indulgently at Kenney’s audacity. “He asked about General MacArthur’s health and asked me to be sure to remember him to the General,” Kenney later wrote.
Kenney was also prepared to talk to the president about press speculation that his commander, a darling of Roosevelt’s Republican critics on Capitol Hill, wanted Roosevelt’s job. MacArthur had been viewed as a presidential hopeful ever since heading up the U.S. Olympic Committee in 1928, and at the beginning of the war, he was so popular among Republican leaders that they pressed Roosevelt to name him commander of all U.S. military forces. Kenney wanted to know whether Roosevelt was worried about a MacArthur candidacy, but the president never mentioned the topic. “MacArthur had told me several times that he was only interested in winning the war,” Kenney later reflected, “and was not in the market for any political office.” That may be, but speculation about Roosevelt’s political prospects was a topic of discussion in Washington, so at the end of their War Department meetings, Kenney and Sutherland met with Congresswoman (and former reporter) Clare Boothe Luce and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the pillars of MacArthur’s political support. Kenney failed to note the meeting in his postwar memoirs, but it was a shameless attempt to prod the JCS—and a reminder that MacArthur had powerful friends in Washington. Kenney’s mini-campaign worked, for by the time he left Washington, he had five hundred more airplanes than when he had arrived. The Southwest Pacific would be “pinched for aircraft for a few months yet,” he said, but by “the end of August we would be ready to go places.”
While Sutherland, Chamberlin, and Kenney were meeting in Washington, MacArthur decided that what he needed was an expert in amphibious warfare—someone who knew how to bring soldiers onto a beach and keep them supplied. MacArthur cabled Marshall, who passed the request to King. Several days later, King ordered Rear Admiral Daniel Barbey to report to MacArthur in Brisbane. An eccentric but brilliant officer, Barbey was nearly alone in his understanding of amphibious operations. But even after Pearl Harbor, Barbey was given only a single assistant to help him. The situation was as bad in Australia, where MacArthur’s newly designated VII Amphibious Force consisted of Barbey, a single aide, as well as “ships yet to arrive or even be built, and men still to be assigned,” as Barbey later recalled. But unlike MacArthur’s many other commanders, Barbey was singularly unimpressed with MacArthur, who, he concluded, was “too aloof and too correct in manner, speech and dress.” Still, Barbey—so likable that nearly everyone in his command referred to him as “Uncle Dan”—thought there was something compelling about the commander. When Barbey walked into MacArthur’s office, the general smiled, shook his hand, and announced that he was going to conquer New Guinea, lay waste to Rabaul, and liberate the Philippines.
“Your job,” MacArthur said, “is to develop an amphibious force that can carry my troops in those campaigns.” MacArthur then hesitated. “Are you lucky?” he asked.
Barbey was taken aback. Lucky? “Yes,” he said.
While Barbey’s appointment was King’s idea, General Walter Krueger’s appointment was MacArthur’s. In mid-January, as his staff was mulling the new plan to capture Rabaul (Elkton II), MacArthur requested that Krueger and his Third Army staff be transferred from the United States to Brisbane. “I am especially anxious to have Krueger because of my long and intimate association with him,” MacArthur told Marshall. The request surprised the army chief, who, because of Krueger’s age (he was sixty-one), had slotted him for a noncombat billet. But no one was more surprised than Krueger. “That he should have remembered me well and favorably enough to ask for my service in the SWPA,” Krueger later wrote, “was as remarkable as it was flattering.”
Marshall agreed to the request, but told MacArthur that Krueger would come to Brisbane with only a part of his staff and head up a new command, the Sixth Army. In fact, MacArthur’s request was a subterfuge, for he wanted his men commanded by Americans, not Australians, and Krueger outranked Thomas Blamey. Krueger also outranked Robert Eichelberger, who interpreted Krueger’s appointment as MacArthur’s punishment for the press attention the senior combat commander had received at Buna. There was another surprise. When Krueger arrived, MacArthur informed him that he would command Alamo Force, which included the Sixth Army “augmented as required by elements of other forces.” None of them were Australian. It was an unusual arrangement, but it kept Blamey out of the chain of command. Privately, the Australians were offended, though Blamey said that he understood the “practical and psychological obstacles in the way of leaving an Australian commander in control of Allied land forces in the field.”
In fact, and despite Marshall’s hesitation, appointing Krueger may well have been the best command decision MacArthur ever made. Unlike the fiery Eichelberger, Walter Krueger was predictable and austere, though in a state of constant anxiety—a characteristic remarked on by his staff, who read his mood by the number of cigarettes he smoked. While historians often compared him to the plodding Union General George Thomas, Krueger’s battlefield mien was more reminiscent of Ulysses S. Grant: He had the expression of a man who could drive his head through a brick wall and might do so at any moment. Born in Prussia, he came to St. Louis with his mother and then moved to Indiana after the death of his father. He joined the army, served in Cuba in the Spanish-American War, left the service as a sergeant, then reenlisted and fought under Arthur MacArthur in the Philippines. Krueger was commissioned an officer in 1901, then served as chief of staff of the American Expeditionary Force’s tank corps in France.
Competence brought success. He was a senior commander during the army’s crucial prewar Louisiana Maneuvers (his chief of staff was Dwight Eisenhower), where he proved an able planner. But for MacArthur’s gossipy staff, Krueger was a man of little imagination, a “no-nonsense drill sergeant.” Others were even less charitable. Krueger, they said, was methodical, distant, and difficult. But while Krueger might have lacked dash, his planning was meticulous. He was the anti-Patton—he sacrificed speed and maneuverability for power. The enemy, he believed, must not simply be defeated; it must be crushed. And he loved his men. When MacArthur complained about one of his divisions, Krueger loudly corrected him. They are all fine soldiers, he snapped.
While MacArthur exaggerated his “long and intimate association” with Krueger (they had met incidentally in 1909 at Fort Leavenworth), he trusted Krueger’s eye for detail. In one celebrated instance, Krueger embarrassed a GI by ordering him to remove his boots, then conducted a close-up inspection of his feet to detect signs of “immersion foot” (caused by prolonged exposure of the skin to warm water); in another incident, he reduced the rank of a commander for failing to treat the condition. Krueger paid particular attention to the 32nd Division after its experience at Buna, where the 126th Regiment had been shot out of existence with a 90 percent casualty rate. Those who were not killed or wounded were suffering from dysentery, malaria, typhus, dengue fever, and hookworm. The incidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (then called battle fatigue) was high, exacerbated by liberal doses of antimalarial drugs (quinine and atabrine), which caused manic depression. Soldier suicides were a constant problem. Krueger’s first act as head of Alamo Force was to establish a rehabilitation center in Rockhampton for the treatment of malaria, but when the 1st Marine Division, which had fought at Guadalcanal, arrived to reinforce MacArthur, the prevalence of the disease shocked Krueger. He then cabled Washington, insisting that additional malaria specialists be sent to Australia.
With the creation of Alamo Force, MacArthur shaped a command structure at odds with the kind created by Eisenhower in Europe. Whereas Eisenhower built an integrated command that included officers of all national armies, MacArthur created an American combat force integrating air, sea, and land assets and a separate “Allied” force under Blamey, who commanded the Australians. In effect, MacArthur’s Americans and Blamey’s Australians fought the same war separately, while Eisenhower’s coalition fought the same war together. The differences set out competing models for American and Allied military cooperation in the postwar era. In fact, although MacArthur was later criticized for giving Blamey’s Australians a secondary role in the Pacific War, the separation of the Australians and Americans dampened the command controversies that plagued Eisenhower. The approach also allowed MacArthur to divide combat responsibilities over a large geographic area. More simply, MacArthur and Eisenhower adopted different command arrangements because they fought different kinds of wars. It was impossible for MacArthur’s armies to fight along a single front (as Eisenhower’s did in France) because of the distances involved. MacArthur’s final plan for Rabaul reflected this reality: As Blamey’s Allied Land (Australian) Forces vaulted up the coast of New Guinea, Krueger’s (American) Alamo Force would cartwheel north from island to island. Both prongs would support the other, as MacArthur’s New Guinea and Halsey’s Guadalcanal operations had at the end of 1942.
After being briefed by MacArthur, Krueger met with Eichelberger. Knowing that Eichelberger resented his presence, Krueger and his chief of staff, Brigadier General George Honnen, spent an evening with him. “Walter Krueger and George had dinner with us last night,” Eichelberger told his wife. “They were in their best form. Walter said the Big Chief said magnificent things about me. . . . [H]e was most friendly in every way and really quite amusing.” But while Krueger wanted to reassure Eichelberger that he, Krueger, wasn’t there to supersede him, it was also clear that MacArthur would give Krueger the toughest combat assignments while assigning Eichelberger to train Krueger’s army. This division of responsibility was the result of the fight at Buna, after which Eichelberger wrote a report criticizing the 32nd Division’s preparations. “The regiments of the 32nd Division needed training in the simple things such as scouting and patrolling,” he said. After reviewing Eichelberger’s report, MacArthur tasked him with providing newly arrived combat units extra weeks of physical hardening designed to replicate the conditions they would find in New Guinea’s jungles.
On April 15, William Halsey and his staff flew into Brisbane from New Caledonia to coordinate the Rabaul offensive. Halsey expected it to be an uncomfortable meeting because his official relationship with MacArthur was ambiguous, the result of Thomas Handy’s directive that Halsey was to act under MacArthur’s “strategic direction” while being responsible to Nimitz. Despite these ambiguous instructions and George Marshall’s calculation that Halsey could stand toe-to-toe with the temperamental Southwest Pacific commander, Halsey was determined to get along with MacArthur.
Marshall need not have worried. Meeting with MacArthur at his headquarters, Halsey laid out his plans. He would land a large unit of Marines at New Georgia, then spring onto Bougainville, leaping forward in planned amphibious operations up the Slot of the Solomons, from southeast to northwest. If all went well, Halsey said, his Marines would be approximately 250 miles southeast of Rabaul by the end of October. MacArthur listened to this in silence, but when Halsey finished, there was a smile on the commander’s face. Rising slowly from his chair, he clapped Halsey on the back. “If you come with me,” he roared, “I’ll make you a greater man than Nelson would ever dream of being.” That was fine with the bullet-shaped Halsey, whose voracious appetite for killing Japanese (“those little yellow bastards,” as he called them) was well known. After the meeting, Halsey wondered what all the fuss was about. “Five minutes after I reported,” he wrote, “I felt as if we were lifelong friends. I have seldom seen a man who makes a quicker, stronger, more favorable impression.” MacArthur was nearly poetic in his praise: “He was of the same aggressive type as John Paul Jones, David Farragut, and George Dewey,” MacArthur wrote of Halsey. “His one thought was to close with the enemy and fight him to the death. The bugaboo of many sailors, the fear of losing ships, was completely alien to his conception of sea action.”
By April 18, MacArthur and Halsey’s staffs had put together a final plan for Rabaul, the aptly named Operation Cartwheel. Ironically, on that same day, near Bougainville, one year to the day after Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25s had bombed Tokyo, eighteen P-38s of the 347th Fighter Group shot down a squadron of Japanese aircraft, one of which was carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Japan’s greatest strategist. The mission, resulting from U.S. decryptions of the Japanese naval cipher, seemed a fitting culmination to MacArthur and Halsey’s efforts. Now the Japanese would have to respond to Cartwheel without their greatest naval commander: Halsey’s Marines would go first, fighting up the Solomons, while the Australians sidled up the coast of New Guinea. Krueger’s Alamo Force would then spring, in a series of hit-’em-where-they-ain’ts, through the Bismarck Sea. Staggered by these roundhouse blows, first from the left and then from the right, the Japanese would be beaten back into Rabaul.
Cartwheel got under way on June 20, when two companies of Marines came ashore on New Georgia, the 45-mile-long island in the central Solomons. Other detachments landed on nearby Rendova Island, the staging area for the New Georgia invasion. More troops landed on New Georgia with elements of the army’s 43rd Division on July 2. The plan was to capture New Georgia’s Munda Point Airfield, with southern (army) forces and northern (Marine) forces fighting their way toward each other through the island’s tangled jungles. By the third week of July, Major General John Hester’s 43rd Division was bogged down in some of the roughest jungle terrain in the world. The fight for New Georgia became a reprise of Buna; like the 32nd, the 43rd was a U.S. National Guard unit, its commanders unprepared for the ferocity of what faced them. By the end of July, Halsey’s headquarters was growingly increasingly worried, with the 43rd engaged in a costly battle of attrition against five thousand Japanese. The close-in fighting took its toll among American GIs, with between fifty and one hundred men each day taking themselves out of the line due to “war neuroses.” A surgeon sent to investigate reported that the “neuroses” were often simple exhaustion. Many of Hester’s men, the surgeon reported, had “not changed clothes or had two continuous hours of sleep; all had the same expression.” The New Georgia campaign began to go well only in mid-July, after Halsey replaced Hester with Major General Oscar Griswold, who did what Eichelberger had done at Buna—he relieved officers, rested and fed his troops, and only then attacked. Griswold took Bibilo Hill, overlooking the Munda Point airstrip, on July 25, but his men had to fight their way through seventy-four pillboxes to do so. On August 5, Griswold’s northern force overran the airfield. The battle lasted into August, as Japanese aircraft and ships sortied into New Georgia, adding a hellish hue to the American victory.
MacArthur’s landings in New Guinea and along the Bismarck barrier went more smoothly than Halsey’s on New Georgia. Soldiers from Krueger’s Alamo Force came ashore at Woodlark and Kiriwina Islands on June 30 while that same day, a detachment of the 41st Division landed at Nassau Bay, further up the coast of New Guinea. MacArthur’s plan was to trick the Japanese into believing that he coveted Salamaua, on the southwest face of Huon Gulf, thereby luring them to its defense. In fact, however, MacArthur was aiming at Lae, a coastal village at the outlet of the Markham River. The Japanese responded by reinforcing Salamaua in mid-July, then shipped 200 fighters and bombers into the airstrip at Wewak. Still outnumbered, fighters from Kenney’s Fifth Air Force conducted a series of raids along the New Guinea coast against smaller Japanese airfields, while Whitehead’s bombers softened up Japanese airstrips at Lae, Finschhafen, Saidor, and Madang. Finally, on August 17, Kenney launched a series of massed attacks against Wewak, putting 122 heavy and medium bombers into the air. This was Clark Field in reverse, with Kenney’s pilots destroying 175 Japanese fighters and bombers on the ground.
On September 4, Australian General George Wooten’s 9th Division was brought ashore just four miles from Lae by Barbey’s amphibious engineers—his “webbed feet.” After Barbey’s work with Krueger’s Alamo Force at Woodlark and Kiriwina, the Lae landings seemed effortless: It was the largest amphibious landing undertaken by Barbey, with the Aussies protected by the fire of Kenney’s bombers. The result was a furious and desperate aerial campaign interdicting the Australians along their two landing zones, at Red and Yellow beaches. The next day, in an effort to cut off the Japanese garrison at Lae from the interior, the U.S. 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment jumped into the Markham Valley at Nadzab. The morning of the drop, MacArthur accompanied Kenney on the mission. As the troopers boarded their planes at Port Moresby, MacArthur walked down the line shaking their hands, then boarded the lead B-17. “I’m not worried about getting shot,” he told the B-17 pilot. “Honestly, the only thing that disturbs me is the possibility that when we hit the rough air over the mountains, my stomach might get upset. I’d hate to throw up and disgrace myself in front of the kids.” When he returned to Port Moresby, he bragged about his adventure in a message to Jean. “It was a honey,” he said of the operation.
The Nadzab adventure was a personal victory for MacArthur; in a single moment, he had shrugged off the whispers of “Dugout Doug” and expunged the memory of the whining general who had arrived unceremoniously at the airstrip at Alice Springs. His hands no longer trembled. In one photograph of MacArthur, he stands amid the gun belts of a B-17 and looks into the distance over the Nadzab drop zone. His jaw is set, his distinctive command hat is perched over his brow, his ubiquitous sunglasses mask his eyes. The 503rd’s jump was spectacular—the regiment was carried to the jump zones aboard ninety-six C-47s that were escorted by an armada of fighters and B-25s. The 503rd landed nearly without incident and seized Nadzab’s airstrip. Coupled with the Australian landings between Lae and Finschhafen, the Nadzab drop forced the Japanese to abandon Salamaua, with Australian patrols intercepting their retreat. By mid-October, a Japanese column of some ten thousand soldiers had reached the north coast of the Huon Peninsula, but the heroic extrication cost them twenty-five hundred lives.
The Japanese high command rethought its strategy. It directed that Bougainville (which it identified as Halsey’s next target) be held at all costs. A new defensive perimeter was drawn from Finschhafen across the Vitiaz and Dampier Straits to Cape Gloucester and from there through New Britain to Rabaul. A combat-tested division was brought from Shanghai to reinforce the Japanese on New Britain, and the garrisons at Madang and Wewak were strengthened. Japanese war planners designated Finschhafen as the key to this new defensive position, ordering Shigeru Kitagiri’s 20th Division on a 200-mile march from Bogadjim (further west on the New Guinea coast) to defend it. But MacArthur anticipated the move and reworked the Cartwheel schedule, moving up the date for Finschhafen’s capture. As a prelude, he ordered an assault on Kaiapit and Dumpu in the Markham Valley by the veteran Australian 7th Division, which was scouring the jungle west of Lae. Kaiapit was captured on September 19, and Dumpu was overrun on October 6. In the meantime, “Uncle Dan’s” amphibious engineers landed a brigade of Wooten’s Australian 9th Division north of Finschhafen in the darkness. The Japanese had spotted the convoy as the sun rose, strafed and bombed it, then contested the invasion in the jungles fronting the landing zones. Unaware that three thousand Japanese of the 21st Independent Mixed Brigade awaited them, Aussie General George Vasey’s men were forced to battle their way overland to secure the town. The fight was brutal, bloody, and at close quarters, but the Japanese were pushed into the jungle on October 2, and MacArthur gained a crucial anchorage on the tip of Huon Gulf.
So far, at least, the MacArthur-Halsey offensive had succeeded. Although the Japanese mounted a savage defense of New Georgia, the island was eventually captured, with the heavy American casualties offset by the somersault moves of Blamey’s Australians. An air of confidence now pervaded MacArthur’s headquarters, even as the Japanese who had faded into the jungle at Finschhafen reorganized to retake the village. The attack, when it came, was the most severe since Buna, lasting from October 16 to October 20. The Japanese broke off their offensive when it proved too costly, but the Australians were forced into a series of battles near Sattelberg, before seizing it on November 17. Finschhafen provided Kenney’s growing command with airstrips for a newly arrived batch of P-38s that would escort bombers on their long run over Rabaul. Kenney was once again the man of the hour. His air force pummeled Rabaul through October and November—an October 12 raid of four hundred bombers and a November 3 raid cost the Japanese twenty planes and five thousand tons of shipping. On November 1, Halsey began his next move up the Solomons, sending the 3rd Marine Division ashore at Bougainville under the protection of the Thirteenth Air Force.
On November 22, MacArthur and his commanders met in Brisbane to review Cartwheel’s schedule. Arrayed around a conference table in the AMP Building, MacArthur, Sutherland, Kenney, Krueger, Barbey, naval commander Admiral Arthur Carpender, and Major General William Rupertus, commander of the just-arrived 1st Marine Division, plotted their next moves. With the Australians moving west along the northern coast of New Guinea, MacArthur needed to vault Krueger’s Alamo Force north into the Bismarck Archipelago. But to do that, MacArthur needed to rethink his invasion timetables, balancing meager resources against the challenge of seizing multiple objectives.
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.
By “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.
Kinkaid 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.