CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Finishing Buna, Looking Ahead

New Year’s Eve of 1942 was a moment of marked contrast for Douglas MacArthur and for the world. In one year’s time, on the many fronts of a global war, the Axis tide had been halted, if not turned. In the South Pacific, Guadalcanal and Buna were not yet free of Japanese troops, but the Allies were advancing. In the Middle East and North Africa, the British had prevailed at El Alamein and were pushing Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps westward toward the Allied forces landed under Operation Torch. In Russia, the expanse of that country and the sacrifices of Soviet soldiers had worn down the Nazi onslaught and trapped a German army at Stalingrad. Perhaps most important to ultimate victory, the American industrial complex had surged into high gear and was turning out ships, planes, and vehicles in staggering numbers.

The war was far from won, but the Allies perceived that it would be won. At MacArthur’s forward headquarters at Port Moresby, there was still angst over Buna, but many remembered the despair of the year before as troops hurried to withdraw across the Calumpit bridges to Bataan. Incredibly, the year that had begun with destruction on Bataan and MacArthur’s retreat from Corregidor had ended with MacArthur more admired and revered by the general American public than any other American army or navy officer. Asked in a Fortune poll in November of 1942 to “name two or three living Americans you would really call great,” ten million high school students ranked MacArthur a close second to Franklin Roosevelt, both of whom received almost ten times the support as the third and fourth names on the list, Jimmy Doolittle and Henry Ford.1

Rank-and-file Australians felt the same way. When the US Congress passed a joint resolution designating June 13, 1942, MacArthur Day—so picked to mark the forty-third anniversary of MacArthur’s enrollment at West Point—Australia celebrated with equal enthusiasm by flying the American flag from public flagpoles. Two months later, a poll by the Daily Telegraph of Sydney found MacArthur to be “the most important public figure” in Australia, well ahead of Prime Minister John Curtin and eclipsing all others.² Many of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen under his command—Australians as well as Americans—remained less enthusiastic in their assessment, but this hardly mattered to the general public.

Despite Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs agreeing to a Germany First strategy, there was considerable public support among Americans for a “Pacific First” effort. During 1942, until the November landings in North Africa, the Pacific was the only theater—save the U-boat war in the North Atlantic—in which American combat troops were directly engaged. Certainly there was an American commitment to defeating Germany, but the war in the Pacific, with its lingering images of American ships lying in smoking ruins as the result of a surprise attack, was at that point far more personal. These images had a profound and continuing impact on the collective American psyche, and Americans readily embraced MacArthur’s public swagger and resolve. MacArthur carefully cultivated this hero image with his own stagecraft and publicity efforts, but frequently, they proved to be a double-edged sword, particularly with those under his command.

Responding to General Blamey about inevitable friction between Australian and American troops when they were in Australia, MacArthur suggested that attempts to use mandatory lectures to improve relations might do more harm than good. “The reaction of the American soldier to formal talks and lectures is not particularly favorable,” he presciently noted. “He is quick to detect propaganda and inclined to resent it.”³

This shrewd observation did not, however, stop MacArthur from dispatching his own propaganda. According to Australian war historian Gavin Long, MacArthur’s “communiqués could not deceive the forward troops and indeed demonstrated a degree of indifference on the part of the flatterers who surrounded MacArthur towards the feelings of the men who were doing the fighting.”4

The Dugout Doug songs and parodies took on new life when it came to lampoons of his ubiquitous communiqués. Among the most widely circulated were these lines:

Here, too, is told the saga bold

Of virile, deathless youth

In stories seldom tarnished with

The plain unvarnished truth.

It’s quite a rag, it waves the flag,

Its motif is the fray,

And modesty is plain to see in

Doug’s communiqué.…

“My battleships bombard the Nips from

Maine to Singapore;

My subs have sunk a million tons;

They’ll sink a billion more.

My aircraft bombed Berlin last night.”

In Italy they say

“Our turn’s tonight, because it’s right in

Doug’s communiqué.…”

And while possibly a rumor now,

Someday it will be fact

That the Lord will hear a deep voice say,

“Move over, God—it’s Mac.”

So bet your shoes that all the news

That last great Judgment Day

Will go to press in nothing less than

Doug’s communiqué!⁵

Indeed, of all the enemies Douglas MacArthur faced over his long military career, the greatest threat to his playing an even larger role in World War II, and certainly to his long-term legacy, came from self-inflicted wounds—his own self-serving communiqués and public relations efforts being prime examples. MacArthur repeatedly demonstrated that he was not a team player when it came to American and Allied command decisions. He was definitely on a team, but it was his own team, and he was the undisputed captain of it—neither willing nor, perhaps, psychologically able to submit to others.

As US Marines splashed ashore on Guadalcanal and Roosevelt made the decision to land American troops in North Africa before the end of the year, no less a household staple than Time magazine reported that, his own headlines aside, MacArthur was presiding over “a secondary, rather than a second, front.”6 MacArthur was enormously sensitive to the indisputable fact that his theater was only a small part of the global Allied strategy.

The New York World-Telegram also noted this in an editorial a few weeks later and suggested that Australia could not receive—despite MacArthur’s and Curtin’s regular entreaties—“a larger share of planes and shipping without jeopardizing global strategy.” The editorial was reprinted in Australian papers—perhaps with MacArthur’s encouragement.

MacArthur complained to Marshall that the editorial “has caused a tremendous upheaval of bitter resentment throughout this country… [and] tends to destroy the morale of the Australian public.” He suggested, “Such an incorrect and damaging statement should not be passed by American censors.”⁷

Marshall made his usual patient response, noting that MacArthur had received regular high-level briefings about Allied global strategy and reminding him of “American newspaper practice regarding freedom of the press with particular reference to the editorial pages.” But then Marshall got to the heart of the matter.

In the Washington Post and other papers, under the dateline “Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Headquarters in Australia, Aug. 6,” Lee Van Atta, a wire services reporter, had quoted an unnamed spokesman who enumerated seven specific points that disparaged the American commitment to Australia, including characterizing the American-Australian supply line as “merely a ‘big trickle’” and American airpower in the Southwest Pacific Area as “completely insignificant” when compared to the potential.

“Each of the seven points,” Marshall scolded MacArthur, “was designed to deprecate the part played by the United States in aiding the war effort in your theater,” and he concluded, “This press release originating from your headquarters can only serve to fan the indignation and resentment that has resulted from the editorial of which you complain.”

Marshall ended by noting that Van Atta’s article created the impression that MacArthur objected to stated policy and that he assumed “this to be an erroneous impression.” Then, in case his words were to fall on deaf ears, Marshall succinctly recapped the global situation faced by the Joint Chiefs and stressed that widespread demands “make our problem exceedingly difficult and complex.”8

MacArthur responded immediately and denied that his headquarters was resorting to subterfuge to influence strategic control. Much as he had done on other occasions, MacArthur, who so zealously controlled information emanating from his headquarters, also denied that Van Atta had gotten his points from him.⁹

But it was hardly a secret that MacArthur disdained the global strategy of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. When Hap Arnold made his visit to Australia and New Guinea late in September, MacArthur went on at length about his opinion that England could “only be considered as a besieged citadel.” No second front could be launched from England; air bases could never be established in sufficient numbers there to provide air cover for a second front, and any move into North Africa was a waste of effort. The one thing that made sense globally, MacArthur told Arnold, was that the Allies should be giving more aid to Russia.¹⁰

Arnold reported these views back to the Joint Chiefs as well as to the Combined Chiefs. Everyone well understood that it was the prerogative, indeed even the duty, of a theater commander to lobby for additional resources for his theater. MacArthur, however, took this to extremes and employed political and public pressure far outside the normal chain of command. It is difficult to imagine anyone else getting away with this, but ultimately Roosevelt judged that the rewards of MacArthur’s image galvanizing American public opinion outweighed the political risks of firing him. It was left to Marshall to manage MacArthur as best he could.

Having contributed to the making of the MacArthur legend by spiriting him off Corregidor and putting up with his press releases and protestations, Roosevelt, Stimson, and Marshall found it difficult if not impossible to rein him in. Exasperated, Stimson tried one more tactic. He summoned the services of the World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker, a man who still enjoyed considerable hero worship in the United States but carried it with a self-effacing humility. Rickenbacker was then president of Eastern Airlines and doing his part for the war effort with an occasional special assignment. Rejecting multiple offers to be commissioned a brigadier general, Rickenbacker turned down the two stars of a major general as well, telling Stimson, “Let me serve as a civilian, where I can do the most good.”

So Rickenbacker was still just “Captain Eddie” when he left Hawaii in a B-17 early on October 21, 1942, destined for MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane and charged with delivering a top-secret verbal message to him. It was “a message of such sensitivity,” Rickenbacker recalled, “that it could not be put on paper.” Stimson gave it to Rickenbacker verbally, and he memorized it “in order to be able to pass it on to General MacArthur the same way.”

En route to Australia, Rickenbacker’s B-17 overshot a refueling stop at Canton Island, and he and his crew were forced to ditch at sea. Their twenty-four days adrift in rafts became one of the epic survival stories of World War II, but after recovering, Rickenbacker continued on to see MacArthur, who by that time was at Port Moresby. According to Rickenbacker, they had not crossed paths since Billy Mitchell’s court-martial, when they had said some unpleasant things to each other.

Rickenbacker had had plenty of time while drifting and recovering to mull over his message to MacArthur, and he resolved to deliver it without emotion. But MacArthur met him on the runway at Port Moresby—an accommodation he extended to very few—and threw his arms around him, exclaiming, “God, Eddie, I’m glad to see you.” Rickenbacker melted briefly but delivered his message nonetheless. Although Rickenbacker professed to remember every word of it, when it came time to write his autobiography, he refused to divulge it. “Stimson and MacArthur took it with them to the grave,” wrote Rickenbacker, “and so shall I.”11

It is not too far of a leap, however, to speculate that his message to MacArthur was a sharp reprimand, demanding that MacArthur cease his personal publicity campaign, stop complaining about the Joint Chiefs and the resources allocated to his theater, and stop waging war against the United States Navy.¹² If Rickenbacker indeed delivered such a message with the firmness Stimson intended, there is little, if any, evidence that MacArthur moderated his ways, certainly not in the final days at Buna.

Sutherland visited the Buna front twice during the week between Christmas of 1942 and New Year’s in 1943, carrying MacArthur’s insistent charge that time was of the essence. MacArthur had ordered Sutherland to get Eichelberger moving and finish the campaign or relieve him. Sutherland would have been Eichelberger’s only readily available replacement, and there is some evidence that Sutherland had zero interest in taking over Eichelberger’s I Corps command, no matter how temporary the assignment would have been. Not only would this have removed him from MacArthur’s side and concomitant power, he also feared becoming stuck in the mire of Papuan operations. It was far easier to fly back and forth from Port Moresby as a critic than it was to take Eichelberger’s place and be held accountable for results.¹³

MacArthur’s perception notwithstanding, Eichelberger and the Thirty-Second Infantry Division had been moving forward despite stout defenses and a tangle of logistics. On January 2, 1943, Buna Mission fell, effectively eliminating Japanese resistance east of the Girua River. The next day, Eichelberger sent a message to his troops praising their efforts. “You are now veterans,” he told them, “and the lessons which have been learned in this campaign must serve to reduce our losses in the future and bring further victory.”¹⁴

The next step toward that victory was to face the final concentration of some seven thousand Japanese troops at Sanananda, midway between Buna and Gona. But as the Thirty-Second Division secured Buna Mission and elements pivoted westward to assist the Australian Seventh Division, MacArthur issued a communiqué that gave the distinct impression that the battle was over. The annihilation of Horii’s South Seas Detachment had been “one of the primary objects of the campaign,” MacArthur reported on January 8, and “this can now be regarded as accomplished.”15

That same day, MacArthur wrote Eichelberger in much the same vein, congratulating him on the success achieved and suggesting his return to Australia as soon as the Forty-First Infantry Division could be rotated in to relieve the Thirty-Second. Then, in contrast to his expressed sentiments from a month before, when he sent Eichelberger to the front, MacArthur added, “I am so glad that you were not injured in the fighting. I always feared that your incessant exposure might result fatally.”¹⁶

The next morning, January 9, MacArthur, Sutherland, and Kenney flew out of Port Moresby and relocated their headquarters back to Brisbane. In doing so, MacArthur was anxious to emphasize his declared victory in Papua no matter how premature his field commanders considered it. At least part of his motivation came from Guadalcanal. The tough campaign there had proved MacArthur and Ghormley right in their preinvasion concerns about amphibious operations beyond the range of land-based air. By claiming he had things wrapped up in Papua when he did, MacArthur beat Halsey by a full month in reporting a major victory. Halsey did not acknowledge the final Japanese defeat on Guadalcanal until February 9.¹⁷

This rush to declare victory overlooked the Japanese troops still ensconced at Sanananda, and it left Eichelberger skeptical of MacArthur’s motives. While the world greeted MacArthur’s return to Brisbane as that of a conquering hero, Eichelberger sensed that MacArthur’s premature actions would serve not only to downplay the final success when it came but also to hold Eichelberger alone accountable should the campaign drag on.¹⁸

As Eichelberger later put it, “Public-relations officers on General MacArthur’s staff chose to call this last phase of the Papua campaign a ‘mopping-up operation.’ Instead, it was a completely savage and expensive battle.” Even as MacArthur issued his “victory” communiqué, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, well aware that Australian troops would bear the brunt of this last phase, acknowledged that “Sanananda… may take a while to master.”19

It did. As the Allied noose tightened, the Japanese fought to the death. Around two thousand mostly sick and wounded Japanese troops evacuated in small numbers by boat and made their way north along the coast to Salamaua and Lae. Others were trapped as they tried to slip through the lines and flee west of Gona. Increased pressure on the Allied side came from the fresh troops of the 163rd Infantry Regiment of the Forty-First Division, recently landed at the growing airfield at Dobodura.²⁰

“I never know which of you two to write to or whether you appreciate my letters,” Eichelberger, referring to Sutherland and MacArthur, tellingly told Sutherland on January 16, “but I imagine you are always glad to get a word. Today I begin to see some signs that the Japanese may be clearing out of this altogether.” Eichelberger went on to tell Sutherland, “You may assure General MacArthur that I will push things in every possible way, short of swinging a ball bat myself.”²¹

Australian Lieutenant General Edmund F. Herring, who had come to work closely with Eichelberger, announced the end on January 22. Marking the real cessation of the fighting in Papua, Herring thanked all involved but paid special tribute to the infantry. “Seldom have Infantry been called on to endure greater hardships or discomfort,” Herring wrote, “than those provided by the mountains, the swamps, the floods, of tropical New Guinea.”²²

On the American front, there can be no question that the Thirty-Second Division prevailed under those hardships. Whether the same result would have occurred in the time frame it did had Eichelberger not done MacArthur’s bidding and fired Harding remains debatable. Even Eichelberger was not sure. “A great deal has been said and whispered about the 32nd Division,” Eichelberger wrote, “and much of it makes no sense. The 32nd which ‘failed’ at Buna was the same 32nd that won the victory there.”²³

Much as they did in the American and Filipino defeat on Bataan, hunger and disease played a major role in the Japanese defeat. Major Mitsuo Koiwai, the only Japanese field grade officer of the South Seas Detachment to fight from Buna to Ioribaiwa Ridge and back and live to tell about it, recounted after the war, “We lost at Buna because we could not retain air superiority, because we could not supply our troops, and because our navy and air force could not disrupt the enemy supply line.” When asked about the effectiveness of the Allied attack, Koiwai said it had been skillfully conducted but added that the Japanese had “wondered whether the Americans would by-pass us and leave us to starve.” Had the Allies not been so determined to take the Buna beachhead by direct attack, starvation would likely have accomplished the same thing in due course.24

But time had been of the essence, hadn’t it? On January 28, MacArthur issued a communiqué announcing that Allied casualties in the Papua land campaign, including numerous deaths from illness, were less than half those of the Japanese. That much was true. “These figures,” MacArthur continued, “reverse the usual results of a ground offensive campaign, especially against prepared positions defended to the last, when losses of the attacker are usually several times that of a defender.”

That may have been true in certain historical circumstances, but what angered MacArthur’s ground commanders, from Herring and Eichelberger on down, was his attempt at further explanation. “There was no necessity to hurry the attack,” MacArthur reported, “because the time element in this case was of little importance; and for this reason no attempt was made to rush the positions by mass and unprepared assault.” Eichelberger, who had labored under MacArthur’s exhortations of urgency, was incredulous.

The only thing missing up to that point was a superlative appeal to history, and MacArthur took care of that in his final paragraph. “The utmost care was taken for the conservation of our forces,” MacArthur concluded, “with the result that probably no campaign in history against a thoroughly prepared and trained army produced such complete and decisive results with a lower expenditure of life and resource.”²⁵

In future operations, for a variety of reasons, MacArthur’s forces would sometimes achieve low casualty rates, but this was not the case in the grueling Papua campaign. Although seemingly detached at times from actual conditions on the Kokoda Trail or beyond Kapa Kapa, MacArthur nonetheless undoubtedly understood that speed was his best weapon against the debilitating diseases and living conditions facing his troops. Indeed he rushed to announce the victory before it had occurred. Why, then, color the facts?

During the six months of the Papua campaign—from the initial Japanese landings at Buna to their final defeat at Sanananda—the Australians committed almost twenty thousand ground troops to the effort and suffered 2,165 killed and 3,533 wounded. Out of just less than fifteen thousand men engaged, American losses were 930 killed and 1,918 wounded. These numbers do not include countless noncombat cases of malaria, dysentery, and other jungle maladies. The Japanese committed between sixteen thousand and seventeen thousand troops to the campaign, of which some twelve thousand were killed. The remainder, including many wounded, were evacuated to Rabaul and Lae.26

On Guadalcanal, US Marine Corps and army ground forces suffered around 1,600 killed in action and 4,245 wounded out of sixty thousand engaged. Japanese losses out of thirty-five thousand army and navy troops fighting on the island were 14,800 killed or missing in combat and nine thousand dead of disease.²⁷

Despite MacArthur’s boast that “probably” no campaign in history had achieved such decisive results with such a low number of casualties, his command suffered twice the number of dead—3,095 versus 1,600—that the army and marines saw on Guadalcanal. He also had more troops wounded than they did—5,451 on Papua versus 4,245 on Guadalcanal. Considering that twice as many Allied troops were engaged on Guadalcanal as on Papua, one out of eleven Allied combat soldiers lost his life in Papua compared to one out of thirty-seven at Guadalcanal.

These losses were tragic. MacArthur may even have sincerely believed it was his duty to minimize them for morale purposes, but rather than stopping there, he went well beyond the facts to paint the results of his command in the best possible light, not only against contemporary commanders but also against the entire sweep of history. “The conclusion is inescapable,” the official US Army history of the campaign acknowledged, “that the fighting in Papua… proportionate to the forces engaged, had been one of the costliest of the Pacific war.”²⁸

Despite this disregard for the facts in some of his Papua communiqués, MacArthur was right on the mark in others. “The outstanding military lesson of this campaign,” MacArthur announced as Sanananda fell, “was the continuous calculated application of airpower… employed in the most intimate tactical and logistical union with ground troops.” For months on end, MacArthur noted, “air transport with constant fighter coverage moved complete Infantry regiments and Artillery battalions across the almost impenetrable mountains and jungles of Papua, and the reaches of the sea; transported field hospitals and other base installations to the front; supplied the troops and evacuated casualties.”

Having evolved a long way from his prewar attempts to downplay airpower, and by then readily seeing it as a radical change in warfare, MacArthur also presciently noted that it would “permit the application of offensive power in swift, massive strokes, rather than the dilatory and costly island-to-island advance that some have assumed to be necessary in a theatre where the enemy’s far-flung strongholds are dispersed throughout a vast expanse of archipelagos.”29 Put simply, MacArthur was talking about island-hopping, about which much more will be said. But in the meantime, anyone doubting that MacArthur wrote—or, at the very least, heavily edited—his own press releases should read that last sentence again. MacArthur never said anything in one phrase that could be made to flow for three or four.

There were two final barrages to come out of the Buna campaign. One was personal and rather petty; the other went to the core of MacArthur’s professional reputation and had global ramifications.

In dispatching Eichelberger to Buna, MacArthur had promised him glory and fame—and indeed, as he said he would, MacArthur released Eichelberger’s name to the press. But after the American press focused on Eichelberger as the fighting general of the Southwest Pacific Area, MacArthur had second thoughts. He recommended Eichelberger for an oak-leaf cluster to go with his Distinguished Service Cross, but he made the award with a citation identical to the one he used for a dozen other officers, many of whom had not been in the front lines.³⁰

Colonel Gordon Rogers, who was Eichelberger’s I Corps intelligence chief, gathered recommendations for the Medal of Honor for Eichelberger and submitted them to MacArthur’s headquarters. Inexplicably, these were “lost,” but when Rogers was reassigned to Washington some weeks later, he took another set with him. The War Department was in favor of the award, but protocol required MacArthur’s approval. As in the case of Jonathan Wainwright the year before, MacArthur replied that he “didn’t think a Medal of Honor was warranted.”31

MacArthur was generous in awarding medals, including the second highest available to army personnel—the Distinguished Service Cross, of which he had two of his own from World War I. It seemed an unwritten rule, however, that awards for general officers were never to equal or outshine his own. Eichelberger came to learn that MacArthur’s Medal of Honor slight—for the man who indeed had repeatedly risked his life to take Buna—was the least of his problems.

As Eichelberger recalled, he discovered that to steal “any publicity from MacArthur was like driving a dagger into his heart.”³² The trouble began when Life ran an article on the battle at Buna that included photographs of Eichelberger looking every bit a muddied and engaged hands-on battlefield commander. A week later, a Saturday Evening Post series, “These Are the Generals,” featured Eichelberger after resistance came to an end at Sanananda.³³ According to Eichelberger, MacArthur sent for him shortly afterward. “Do you realize I could reduce you to the grade of colonel tomorrow and send you home?” MacArthur demanded. “Of course you could,” Eichelberger responded. “Well,” replied MacArthur, “I won’t do it.”³⁴

What Eichelberger took from this strange encounter was a veiled threat: Eichelberger should minimize his personal publicity—in spite of MacArthur’s earlier promises—or else. “I would rather have you slip a rattlesnake in my pocket than to have you give me any publicity,” Eichelberger told an old friend in the War Department. Later, he went on at some length and professed to his brother: “I went through many unhappy months because of the publicity that came out about me after Buna. I paid through the nose for every line of it.”³⁵

It wasn’t that MacArthur didn’t hold Eichelberger in high regard. MacArthur wrote in his memoirs that Eichelberger “proved himself a commander of the first order, fearless in battle, and especially popular with Australians.” Eichelberger himself acknowledged that MacArthur spoke highly of him. It wasn’t a question of his abilities, Eichelberger concluded, but rather that MacArthur “didn’t intend to have any figures rise up between him and his place in history.”36

While there is probably considerable truth to Eichelberger’s rendition of these events, it is likely that Eichelberger, who had his own measure of ego and bouts with paranoia, judged MacArthur a little too harshly. Although MacArthur did not choose Eichelberger when he needed a general to command the first American army in the Southwest Pacific theater—that story to come—MacArthur and Eichelberger would continue to work together all the way to Tokyo.

The other post-Buna barrage was a good deal more complicated. During the final days of the Buna campaign, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff (except Leahy, who was sidelined with bronchitis) met for a major planning conference in Casablanca, Morocco. Churchill initially suggested Iceland in hopes that Stalin might attend, but Roosevelt decreed it too cold, and in any event Stalin declined to leave the Soviet Union while the situation on the German front remained volatile. As the location of the first wartime conference outside the United States, Casablanca suited Roosevelt perfectly. He could avoid going to London and, with it, any hint of subservience to Great Britain while highlighting the American combat effort in North Africa.

Three major strategic decisions affecting the Allied war effort came out of the Casablanca Conference. First, the offensive drive begun in North Africa would continue with the July 1943 invasion of Sicily. Second, there would be no invasion across the English Channel in 1943; instead, operations against Germany would focus on antisubmarine efforts in the North Atlantic and on round-the-clock bombing campaigns over the continent. Finally, while Germany First remained the overall Allied strategy, Admiral King successfully increased the resource allocation for the Pacific—for both Nimitz and MacArthur—from around 15 percent to 30 percent of the total war effort.³⁷

This latter situation was somewhat forced upon the Joint Chiefs by Japan’s ferocious reaction not only against Guadalcanal, where a modest American counterattack turned into an epic six-month campaign, but also against MacArthur in New Guinea, where it had taken the Allies six months to get back to ground zero at Buna.

At the time of the Casablanca Conference, strategic direction throughout the Pacific was still based on the “three tasks” directive of July 2, 1942. The Guadalcanal campaign, essentially task 1, had proved far costlier and lengthier than anticipated. MacArthur had encountered similar cost and time overruns simply by getting into a position where he could begin to execute task 2—seizing the remainder of the Solomons and New Guinea as far north as Lae. Task 3, the capture of Rabaul, looked increasingly difficult and far off.

Considering who was to command task 2 brought the Joint Chiefs back to the shadowy issue of unity of command. Any operations along the coast of New Guinea were well within MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area. At the time, the remainder of the Solomon Islands was, too, although King and Nimitz, having witnessed the frenzied naval action around Guadalcanal, anticipated more of the same as the advance moved forward. They were as loath as ever to place major naval forces under MacArthur’s command.

When Hap Arnold returned to Washington from his September 1942 inspection trip to the Pacific, he wrote Marshall a blunt memo urging unity of command in the entire Pacific. His reasons for wanting an army officer at the top were rather harsh on the navy. Arnold felt “the Navy has not demonstrated its ability to properly conduct air operations, particularly land-based air operations,” and further claimed that it had no appreciation for logistics. This, Arnold said, had consequently hamstrung operations with a shortage of supplies and installations. (Evidently, Arnold did not give the navy credit for delivering the fighters Kenney’s ground crews were uncrating and getting into the air.)

Knowing King would howl in protest, Arnold told Marshall that Roosevelt would have to order unity of command in the entire Pacific by presidential decree. Then Arnold recommended three army officers whom he judged qualified for such a command: MacArthur; Lieutenant General Joseph T. McNarney, an Army Air Forces officer serving as Marshall’s deputy chief of staff; and Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, commanding general of the Army Ground Forces, who was responsible to Marshall for the training and logistics of combat troops deploying overseas.38

Just as he occasionally did with those of MacArthur’s missives he judged likely to create a firestorm, Marshall did not respond directly. Instead he passed Arnold’s memo to his war plans staff. Brigadier General St. Clair Streett, an airman and the head of the Pacific Theater Group, thought unity of command in the Pacific expressed a “Utopian view,” but he suggested it might be made palatable to the navy if the right commander were chosen. Major General Albert C. Wedemeyer, chief of the war plans staff, agreed and advised that the top commander should come from the service branch that would carry the chief operational burden. At that point, Wedemeyer judged the Pacific to be largely an air operation, and he recommended Arnold himself.³⁹

After reconsidering, Streett concluded that the chief obstacles to “a sane military” solution were the political ramifications involving Douglas MacArthur as a media star. To ease the situation, Streett suggested making MacArthur ambassador to the Soviet Union, replacing him in the Southwest Pacific Area with Eichelberger, then combining the South Pacific and Southwest Pacific Areas under either Nimitz or McNarney as supreme commander—“depending on whether air or Navy was considered to have the dominant role.”⁴⁰

MacArthur as ambassador to the Soviet Union was not as far-fetched as it now sounds. He would have been going to Stalin’s proletariat and not the court of the Romanovs, but Russia nonetheless held a measure of intrigue for MacArthur. He was always one to recognize Russia’s pivotal importance to Allied global victory, even if he skewed that importance toward the Pacific instead of Europe. MacArthur initially complained about aircraft and munitions going to Russia instead of to the Southwest Pacific Area, but he understood the same fundamental truth that Churchill and Roosevelt did: the Soviet Union was the essential key to victory and must be kept in the war.

Despite his prior hard-line positions—he had seen Communists behind every bush at the Bonus March—MacArthur issued a greeting to the Red Army while still on Corregidor, calling the defense of Moscow the “greatest military achievement in all history” and saying that the “hopes of civilization rest on the worthy banners of the courageous Russian Army.” He was thinking far more militarily than politically at that point, but the fact that MacArthur could get away with releasing such a politically charged statement shows how difficult it was for Washington to control his press releases. MacArthur repeatedly called for early Soviet entry into the war in the Pacific and advocated that the much-touted second front be one that waged war directly against Japan.41

All Streett’s recommendations came to naught, however. In a memo to Roosevelt, Marshall included a rather bland recommendation for further unity of command in the Pacific, at least between the South Pacific and Southwest Pacific Areas, but no action was taken. The truth of the matter was that as compelling as unity of command sounded from army and navy perspectives when each assumed it would hold the lead role, unity of command, even in Europe, was limited to a specific theater of operations and not given hemispheric or even continental scope. There were supreme commanders in the Mediterranean, Europe, and the waters of the North Atlantic as well as Southeast Asia. This got dicey in the South Pacific, where a theater dividing line bisected a tiny island, but the Joint Chiefs had managed that situation—on Guadalcanal—by moving the line a degree of longitude westward, then instructing MacArthur and Ghormley, and later MacArthur and Halsey, to work together.⁴²

All this raises the question: Would Douglas MacArthur have been given supreme command of a unified Southwest Pacific and South Pacific Area if it weren’t for the enmity he displayed toward the United States Navy (which, it should be noted, was readily reciprocated)? Secretary of war Stimson, who slowly but surely seems to have gotten his fill of MacArthur, confessed that MacArthur was “a constant bone of contention” between the War and Navy Departments and that his “extraordinary brilliance… was not always matched by his tact.” Nonetheless, Stimson felt “the Navy’s astonishing bitterness against him seemed childish.”⁴³ Clearly, both service branches had to reach some measure of accommodation.

Prior to the Casablanca Conference, King had asked Nimitz to propose scenarios in which either Halsey or MacArthur would be in command of flanking maneuvers against the remainder of the Solomons that would avoid costly and time-consuming frontal attacks like those at Guadalcanal. Nimitz urged that task 2 of the original directive be changed to provide for Halsey to command in the Solomons instead of MacArthur. “I estimate that the bulk of the Pacific Fleet,” Nimitz told King, “will continue to be required and I consider that any change of command of these forces which Halsey has welded into a working organization would be most unwise.”44

While the Joint Chiefs were at Casablanca, navy planners concurred with Nimitz that the time had not yet come to turn over the Solomons campaign to MacArthur. They suggested, however, that MacArthur might be given direction over task 2, but only if his Southwest Pacific Area was responsible to Nimitz’s Pacific Ocean Area command. That possibility sent shock waves through the army. While Marshall agreed in principle to unity of command in the entire Pacific, he chose to sidestep the lightning-rod matter of overall Pacific command and instead took King and the navy up on the suggestion that MacArthur be given strategic command of task 2 as an initial step.

Fine-tuning this notion, Marshall suggested—and King generally agreed—that the dividing line between the South Pacific and Southwest Pacific Areas should be kept as it was. MacArthur would have strategic direction of all forces involved in operations in the Solomons, New Guinea, and the Bismarck Archipelago with the ultimate objective of Rabaul, but Nimitz would retain control of the Pacific Fleet in any actions required to accomplish tasks 2 and 3 so as to be able to meet other exigencies around the Pacific. Further, Halsey, as commander of the South Pacific Area (COMSOPAC), responsible to Nimitz, would exercise direct command of all naval forces in the campaign against Rabaul. While subject to MacArthur’s strategic directives about when and where to attack, Halsey would be answerable to Nimitz for just about everything else.⁴⁵

King was not yet fully committed to MacArthur’s assuming strategic control, but he nonetheless agreed when the Joint Chiefs asked MacArthur to submit his plans for carrying out tasks 2 and 3. Thus, as 1943 progressed, MacArthur was to have the immediate task of pressing operations in New Guinea from Buna toward Lae as well as working with Halsey in the Solomons. How well he could satisfy the Joints Chiefs with his strategic plans, and how well he could work with Halsey to implement them, remained to be seen.