CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

One General to Another

In the wake of the Quadrant conference at Quebec, in August of 1943, there was a great deal of speculation about Douglas MacArthur’s ultimate fate. Speculation was nothing new when it came to MacArthur. There had been those who were certain he was doomed on Corregidor early in 1942 even as others advocated his appointment as supreme commander of all American forces, perhaps even all Allied forces.

The post-Quadrant speculation centered on the strategy to be employed in the American drive across the Pacific. Would the primary axis be through the central Pacific or from MacArthur’s front in the southwestern Pacific? Sensing the momentum shifting to the central Pacific, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail asked in a headline, ‘GARRISON’ POST FOR MACARTHUR? Quoting a New York Herald Tribune correspondent, the Australian newspaper noted the probability that MacArthur’s SWPA command “will be reduced within six months to the status of a garrison holding recaptured territories while drives from other directions aim at the East Indies and the Philippines.” MacArthur’s old friend John C. O’Laughlin, publisher of the Army and Navy Journal, offered a different viewpoint. He claimed that MacArthur’s “recent victories justify the expectation that he is destined for the direction of a far greater sphere of operations in the Pacific than he now commands.”¹

Which it would be was in large measure a decision for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a decision that would require ratification by the Combined Chiefs of Staff and, ultimately, by Roosevelt and Churchill. Collectively, they held MacArthur’s fate in their hands, and in the late fall of 1943, the Allies once again convened wartime conferences to ponder it among their long list of global priorities and exigencies.

Franklin Roosevelt left Washington on November 11, 1943, to meet his Allied partners in Cairo and then Tehran. His immediate party included his increasingly indispensable chief of staff, Admiral William D. Leahy; presidential confidant, Harry Hopkins; and physician, Ross McIntire. They cruised down the Potomac to Chesapeake Bay on the presidential yacht and boarded one of America’s newest battleships, the Iowa. Marshall, King, and Arnold were already on board, and the battleship immediately steamed to the naval base at Hampton Roads to top off its fuel before racing eastward across the Atlantic.

Dwight Eisenhower met the presidential party as it disembarked at Oran, Algeria, and flew east to Allied headquarters at Tunis. That night, Leahy was obliged to accompany Roosevelt, but Eisenhower invited Marshall and King to spend a quiet evening at his little getaway cottage in nearby Carthage. Inevitably, perhaps, the casual conversation turned to the question of who would command Operation Overlord, the cross-channel invasion of mainland Europe set for the late spring of 1944.

Never one to fail to speak his mind, King opined that Roosevelt had tentatively decided to give the Overlord command to Marshall, despite King’s strenuous objections. It wasn’t that King didn’t like Marshall. They had in fact been working well together—albeit warily—to forge an army-navy partnership. King believed that “Marshall always wanted that command,” but King felt Marshall couldn’t be spared from the work of the Joint Chiefs and particularly that of the Combined Chiefs. The only mitigating circumstance with Marshall commanding Overlord, King went on to say, was that Eisenhower was the likely heir to Marshall as chief of staff. King had become friendly with Eisenhower early in the war when Ike stood up to King’s usual bluster. King would have been very glad to work with him, but he nonetheless “believed it was a mistake to shift the key members of a winning team.”2

Marshall listened in silence to King’s discourse, as always keeping close counsel of his own emotions. King’s opinions aside, the decision was Roosevelt’s and Roosevelt’s alone, but it is interesting to speculate how Marshall’s command of Overlord and Eisenhower’s appointment as chief of staff might have affected MacArthur had Eisenhower become the direct superior of the man he had long served as an aide.

The next morning, the entire American delegation flew to Cairo to join Churchill and his military chiefs and rehearse a united front before flying on to Tehran to meet their third major ally, Joseph Stalin. Instead of proceeding in harmony, however, the Cairo meetings proved more combative than most, with arguments over the date of Overlord, Churchill’s preoccupation with Allied exploits in the eastern Mediterranean, and the viability of an amphibious assault against the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, intended to pressure Japan in Burma and French Indochina. It didn’t seem to help Anglo-American relations that Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, of China, were present.

Like the Soviet Union, China was sometimes a forgotten ally in the war. The British were more interested in India, but Roosevelt and the American Joint Chiefs recognized that as barely manageable as China was as a country—not to mention as an ally—it had several million men under arms who ostensibly kept a like number of Japanese troops occupied there instead of allowing them to oppose MacArthur and Nimitz elsewhere in the Pacific. At the time, MacArthur’s cherished thrust through the Philippines notwithstanding, Leahy and King generally assumed that Japan would ultimately be attacked from land bases in China.3

With less collegiality than originally planned, the key American and British representatives flew east to Tehran on the morning of November 27 after waiting three hours for a clingy fog to dissipate. Despite the American and British debates about strategy in the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia, Stalin had only one thing on his mind: in essence, he would not consider his allies irrevocably committed to a second front in Europe until American and British boots came ashore in France. Assured by Roosevelt that that would happen, Stalin put the president on the spot by asking who the commander of the effort was to be. Roosevelt couldn’t tell him because, as he whispered to Leahy, “I have not yet made up my mind.”⁴

In a subsequent meeting of the Combined Chiefs, the British representatives—their prime minister’s fixation with the Mediterranean aside—“fell into line,” in Leahy’s words, and agreed to launch Overlord’s cross-channel attack in May of 1944 and support a follow-up invasion of southern France from the Mediterranean. While European plans continued to dominate the remainder of the conference in Tehran, Stalin made one pronouncement that was to reverberate through future American planning in the Pacific when he announced the Soviet Union’s commitment to join in the war against Japan after Germany’s defeat. Carrying the brunt of the Pacific effort as they were, the American Joint Chiefs viewed this as an essential ingredient in Japan’s unconditional surrender and a helpful clarification of long-range Pacific strategy.5

The most significant portion of the Cairo-Tehran conferences for MacArthur and the Pacific occurred when the British and American delegations returned to Cairo after Tehran for a portmortem. Given the sacrosanct commitment to Stalin for Overlord, American plans for both MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s areas in the Pacific, and Roosevelt’s wish to aid China by invading the Andaman Islands, Allied amphibious requirements for 1944—particularly landing craft—were stretched beyond the breaking point. Something had to give.

The weak link proved to be Operation Buccaneer, the Andaman Island invasion. Despite Roosevelt’s longtime support for China as an ally, Chiang Kai-shek had generally failed to reciprocate. While Marshall and King were initially as reluctant as Roosevelt to relegate China to a secondary theater, MacArthur’s and Halsey’s drives across the South Pacific, Nimitz following suit in the Central Pacific Area, and Stalin’s vow to join in the Pacific effort all lessened the military importance of China in defeating Japan. Whatever long-range political goals Roosevelt had sought in aiding China were sidetracked in the interests of accomplishing the overriding objective: the timely unconditional surrender of both Germany and Japan.⁶

With Buccaneer off the table, the Joint Chiefs focused on the question that had hung over Pacific operations since MacArthur’s presence in Australia and King’s counterattack at Guadalcanal challenged the long-held Plan Orange concept of one drive through the central Pacific. Embracing what had evolved almost by default in the two years since Pearl Harbor, the post-Tehran “Overall Plan for the Defeat of Japan” proposed advances by both MacArthur and Nimitz and envisioned mutual support and the ready transfer of forces and resources from one area to another as needed.

The overall objective was to seize positions from which a bombing campaign and a sea and air blockade could be conducted and from which an invasion of Japan proper could be mounted if that was to prove necessary. As to priorities between the two fronts, the plan held: “When conflicts in timing and allocation of means exist, due weight should be accorded to the fact that operations in the Central Pacific promise at this time a more rapid advance toward Japan and her vital lines of communications; the earlier acquisition of strategic air bases closer to the Japanese homeland; and, of greatest importance, are more likely to precipitate a decisive engagement with the Japanese Fleet.”7

While planners presented this statement in a Combined Chiefs of Staff memorandum, CCS 417, the Americans and the British both understood that the Pacific remained largely an American effort—the Australians fighting in New Guinea notwithstanding. CCS 417 as drafted reinforced two ingrained perceptions: first, that MacArthur would still look over his shoulder, convinced he was not getting the priority he demanded, and, second, that the US Navy still anticipated meeting the Japanese fleet in one grand battle as opposed to chipping away at it by attacks of attrition.

Before the Combined Chiefs approved CCS 417, MacArthur’s representative at the Cairo conferences was given a chance to convince the Joint Chiefs that the top priority for operations in the Pacific should be given to MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area. It was no surprise that his representative was Major General Richard K. Sutherland, but the evolution of Sutherland’s role since he had represented MacArthur at the Pacific Military Conference the preceding March requires some scrutiny.

For starters, might MacArthur have attended the Cairo conferences himself? There is no record of his having been invited, and there is in fact ample evidence of his eschewing opportunities to leave Australia for strategic conferences in Nouméa and Honolulu. MacArthur routinely cited command responsibilities that precluded his absence from Brisbane. Yet similar command issues did not keep Nimitz from leaving Honolulu for the West Coast to confer repeatedly with King, nor did they keep Lord Louis Mountbatten, recently appointed supreme allied commander for the South East Asia Command (SEAC), from attending the Cairo conferences.

Did MacArthur really not trust Blamey to act in his absence? He had already removed Krueger’s Alamo Force from Allied control, making the point largely moot. Or did he wish to preserve his kingpin status and a certain amount of aloofness? In Brisbane, MacArthur had no equal. Even the Australian prime minister bowed—almost literally—before him. At Cairo, Tehran, or even in Honolulu, MacArthur would have been but one of many wearing four stars and clearly subservient to Franklin Roosevelt. Whatever the reason, MacArthur generally stayed in Brisbane—with occasional visits to Port Moresby—while Sutherland carried MacArthur’s banner around the globe.

Having represented MacArthur in Operation Cartwheel planning earlier in the year, Sutherland again left Brisbane for Washington to present MacArthur’s Reno plans, the next phases of the return to the Philippines. Sutherland’s charge from MacArthur seemed sweeping in scope. As MacArthur explained in a message to Marshall, “Plans revised in accordance with Quadrant decisions [principally, bypassing Rabaul] are being taken to Washington by Sutherland who will present also my summary of the present situation and my recommendations for future actions in the Pacific. He is scheduled to arrive in Washington about November fourth. Sutherland is completely familiar with my tactical and strategical views and is authorized to speak with my full authority. I urgently recommend that he be given an opportunity to present them fully before the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff.”8

What was extraordinary about this message is that, according to Sutherland’s clerk, Paul Rogers, Sutherland dictated it and then, without MacArthur having seen it, had Rogers initial it on Sutherland’s behalf and send it. Had MacArthur seen it, Rogers was certain MacArthur would have approved it, so in sync were the two men. Nonetheless, this message and Sutherland’s subsequent journey to Washington and on to Cairo marked Sutherland’s stepping out of MacArthur’s shadow and acting as though he belonged on the stage of global strategic planning in his own right.9

Sutherland would not have dared to take this step but for his years of tutelage under MacArthur and MacArthur’s confidence in him. The dynamic between the two, however, had become increasingly complex. The master-student relationship begun in Manila in the late 1930s slowly evolved to the point where Sutherland became MacArthur’s alter ego—it will be remembered that on the chaotic morning of December 8, 1941, Sutherland may have held air boss Brereton at bay on his own and kept him from seeing MacArthur.

In those years, particularly after their escape from Corregidor together, MacArthur trusted Sutherland implicitly. In return, Sutherland, a definite control freak and workaholic, saw to every detail and anticipated every MacArthur need, even as he went to extremes in mirroring some of MacArthur’s harsh feelings—most obviously, his strident hostility to the navy.

If MacArthur sometimes appeared brooding, distant, and moody, his demeanor was in part enabled by Sutherland’s management of his headquarters, which gave MacArthur time to wax reflective. How many of those hours MacArthur spent pondering the strategy of the southwestern Pacific versus rehashing his paranoia over the Washington cartel he was certain was out to get him—or perhaps even daydreaming of his father’s charge up Missionary Ridge—only he knew. In retrospect, it seems likely that at least some of that time was spent rehearsing in his mind, if not out loud, the pronouncements he made so seemingly effortlessly on major occasions.¹⁰

As the loyal and efficient chief of staff, Sutherland had seen his star rise as MacArthur’s had. There was no question that Sutherland had power and could issue almost any order in MacArthur’s name with impunity from his chief. That power belonged to MacArthur; it was only on loan to Sutherland. But during the six months between Sutherland’s representation of MacArthur at the Pacific Military Conference and his mission to Washington—whether in a case of vaulting ambition or wanting to be judged on his own merits—Sutherland increasingly assumed more of the MacArthur mantle as his own.¹¹

Once in Washington with the Reno plans, Sutherland met with the Joint Staff planners and confronted their proposed schedule for Pacific operations in 1944. While central Pacific operations extended as far as the Mariana and Palau islands, the southwestern Pacific advance stopped with an August 1944 invasion of the Vogelkop Peninsula. This schedule embraced the first three Reno phases, advancing along the New Guinea coast and through the Admiralties, but omitted any reference to the final two phases, which called for landings in Mindanao and the recapture of the southern Philippines. If Sutherland wanted to assume MacArthur’s mantle by keeping the Philippines a priority, he had his work cut out for him.

Repeating MacArthur’s familiar arguments for returning to the islands, Sutherland made the case that an invasion of Mindanao might force the Japanese into a decisive fleet engagement, provide a favorable position from which to strangle Japanese shipping, and permit the Allies’ land-based air strength to apply maximum pressure. “We thereby attack the enemy,” Sutherland argued, “in each of his four major points of weakness: oil, naval and merchant shipping, and the air.” Discounting the evolving dual drives across the Pacific, Sutherland termed the central Pacific offensive “most hazardous” and claimed that it captured only island outposts rather than severing Japan’s East Indies lifeline.

“To attempt a major effort along each axis,” Sutherland concluded, “would result in weakness everywhere in violation of cardinal principles of war, and… in failure to reach the vital strategic objective at the earliest possible date, thus prolonging the war.” His solution—and MacArthur’s, of course—was one concerted drive through the Southwest Pacific Area.12

The Joint Staff planners were not swayed by Sutherland’s arguments, and the next order of business was to pack for Cairo. En route via Tunis, Sutherland met Eisenhower and renewed their acquaintance from prewar Manila. Seeing Ike with two more stars on his shoulder than Sutherland wore as a major general, Sutherland would have found it difficult not to reflect on their different career paths. Sutherland had remained a staff officer, while Eisenhower left Manila seeking a field command. Although Marshall kept pulling Eisenhower back into staff circles—much to Eisenhower’s eventual benefit—Ike was about to become either chief of staff or commander of the largest amphibious invasion in history. Sutherland was far too ambitious not to feel some measure of jealousy, and it further spurred his growing independence from MacArthur.

After the initial round of British-American talks in Cairo, Sutherland waited less than patiently as only Roosevelt, the Joint Chiefs, and a few key aides flew on to Tehran with their British counterparts. When they returned to Cairo for the portmortem, Sutherland finally had the opportunity to address the Joint Chiefs on Pacific strategy, just as MacArthur had requested a month earlier. He went to great lengths to characterize the activities along the central Pacific axis as a slow process of attrition that in and of itself did not achieve any vital strategic results. It was also a course of action, he claimed, that did not employ what MacArthur, with help from Kenney and Barbey, had begun to demonstrate in the southwestern Pacific, namely, in Sutherland’s words, the “effective combination of the three essentials of modern combat: land, sea and air power.”

Sutherland’s “enthusiasm,” the Joint Chiefs’ official history reports, had no more effect on the Joint Chiefs than it had had earlier with the planning staff. Admiral King’s mind appeared made up before Sutherland spoke, and his colleagues leaned the same way. They simply were still not ready to designate one axis of advance in the Pacific to the exclusion of the other. Instead they approved the basic language of CCS 417 and sanctioned twin drives of mutually supporting operations with due weight being given to the central Pacific in the event of conflict.13 What was to happen as MacArthur and Nimitz converged on the Philippines from two different angles would be dealt with down the road.

As the second round of Cairo talks adjourned, the Allied leadership headed home. Sometime on his return flight west from Cairo to Tunis, Roosevelt told Leahy that he had made his decision about who would be the supreme commander for Operation Overlord. “Well, Ike,” Roosevelt told Eisenhower upon landing in Tunis, “you are going to command Overlord.” George Marshall, Roosevelt had decided, simply could not be spared in Washington.¹⁴

Sutherland, meanwhile, prepared to fly east. Sometime before leaving Washington, perhaps even before departing Australia, he hatched a plan to return from the Cairo conference across the Middle East, India, and the Indian Ocean, thereby circumnavigating the globe. Admittedly, it was shorter than retracing his path, but the route was also more dangerous, given Japanese forces around Java.

To pilot his C-54, a four-engine transport akin to the civilian DC-4, Sutherland tapped Weldon E. “Dusty” Rhoades, a veteran United Airlines pilot about to be inducted into the Army Air Forces mostly because MacArthur and Sutherland wanted him to be their personal pilot. Rhoades was one of those rare people to whom MacArthur and Sutherland took an instant liking. Rhoades, in turn, was among the few who idolized both men.15

On the evening of December 7, 1943, Rhoades prepared to take off from Cairo bound for Karachi with Sutherland on board when he learned he was to have additional passengers. Chief of staff Marshall wanted to hop a ride to the Pacific and had been planning the trip for some time. As early as November 22, Marshall advised an aide to have a courier bring him a summer cap and uniform.

“I have aboard more brass than I’ve ever hauled on one trip before,” Rhoades recorded in his diary. In addition to Marshall, the nine general officers included Major General Thomas Handy, assistant chief of staff for operations; Lieutenant General Albert Wedemeyer, slated to be Mountbatten’s chief of staff; and Rear Admiral Charles “Savvy” Cooke, King’s top planner.¹⁶

The trip got off to a nearly fatal start. With his regular copilot sprawled in the cabin, sick, Rhoades had Sutherland in the copilot’s seat as they battled turbulence over the Persian Gulf and headed directly toward Karachi. The best map available was in French and of dubious quality. Suddenly, a lightning flash revealed a towering wall of mountains dead ahead. Rhoades did a quick 180-degree turn and took a closer look at the map. The elevations were in meters instead of feet. Rhoades decided not to tell his crew and passengers about the near miss but later conceded it was “the nearest I have ever come to killing myself in an airplane.”¹⁷ Certainly Marshall’s loss would have been almost incalculable.

After Marshall and Sutherland conferred with Mountbatten in New Delhi, where Wedemeyer deplaned, Rhoades flew the party on to Colombo, Ceylon, and then prepared to fly the 3,200 miles to Exmouth Gulf, on the northwestern tip of Australia. Navigating mostly by the stars, Rhoades arrived right on the spot just before sunrise and ended up sharing a room with Marshall as they all tried to get some sleep. Broiling heat soon foiled those plans, and the generals decided that if Rhoades weren’t too tired to continue, they might just as well find cooler air in the sky and press on for Brisbane. By then, Rhoades called the 2,600-mile flight across Australia “almost trivial,” and they landed at Amberley Field, outside Brisbane, on the morning of December 13.18

According to biographer Forrest Pogue, Marshall had planned trips to MacArthur’s theater twice before, only to have them thwarted by pressing business elsewhere. He thought it “highly important that he see the Pacific situation for himself… and show MacArthur that he had not been forgotten.” MacArthur, however, was not on hand in Brisbane to greet him.¹⁹

The day before, MacArthur flew to his forward headquarters at Port Moresby in anticipation of the Arawe and Cape Gloucester landings. He had received word that Marshall was flying to Australia, but he chose to stick to his plans to visit Goodenough Island for a preinvasion conference with Krueger rather than remain in Brisbane and meet Marshall. So instead, Marshall, Cooke, and Handy followed MacArthur from Brisbane to Port Moresby, where Kenney met them and proceeded to give them a flying tour of the New Guinea front.

This circumstance was quite logical and happened to provide Marshall with a much better picture of the theater than he would have gotten from a hotel suite in Brisbane, but as with everything MacArthur, these events stoked controversy. Despite countless assertions to the contrary in secondary sources, Marshall had not been part of the Chaumont clique supposedly out to get MacArthur during World War I, and MacArthur had held Marshall in nothing but esteem when as chief of staff he delegated him to train National Guard troops. Their history together since Marshall’s appointment as chief of staff had had its moments of friction, but Marshall generally recognized MacArthur’s military and political worth. Marshall had managed MacArthur’s mercurial traits even as he served as the lightning rod for MacArthur’s aggressive and occasionally manipulative advocacy of his Southwest Pacific Area operations.

These basic facts did not, however, keep storytellers from spinning a more pointed version of the relationship between the two generals. Chief among them was Frazier Hunt, who wrote in The Untold Story of Douglas MacArthur that MacArthur “was of the opinion that as a result of both the present and the past differences between himself and Marshall, their meeting might be somewhat embarrassing to his distinguished visitor. MacArthur seriously considered conducting the Gloucester operations in person, thus relieving Marshall of his presence.” Whether that would have been gracious or the ultimate snub is debatable. Then MacArthur supposedly remarked, “No, I’ll stay, but I’ll make the prophecy that he’ll never see me alone. He’ll always find a way to have someone else present.”20

On the afternoon of December 15—after Kenney’s flying tour of Nadzab, Lae, and Buna—Marshall and his party landed on Goodenough Island and met MacArthur and members of his staff, including operations chief Stephen Chamberlin and Admiral Kinkaid, for lunch. Paul Rogers remembered Marshall as an imposing and dignified figure who called MacArthur Douglas, something Rogers had never heard anyone else do. While “their demeanor was formal and restrained” with no signs of “intimacy or close friendship”—which, after all, was not characteristic of either man—“there did not appear to be any particular strain.” Rogers reported that the sixty-two-year-old Marshall showed the effects of his many hours in the air and “seemed fatigued.”²¹

Marshall nonetheless briefed MacArthur, Chamberlin, Kenney, Kinkaid, and Krueger on the situation in Europe, and MacArthur responded with a review of operations in the southwestern Pacific. Admiral Cooke added a report on central Pacific operations, which included the landings at Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands, although Kenney showed the SWPA bias by later writing that he “didn’t see any reason for fooling with the Central Pacific.” By all accounts, it was a frank but nonetheless harmonious exchange of news and ideas. As General Handy remembered years later, “I didn’t see any evidence of any conflict between Marshall and MacArthur.”

The following morning, Marshall inspected troops with Krueger, then flew back to Port Moresby with MacArthur. After a few hours on the ground, Marshall and his party were back in the air before midnight on December 16, headed for Guadalcanal to meet Halsey and take similar stock of the situation in the South Pacific Area.22

Whether MacArthur and Marshall met alone during their less than thirty-six hours together is unclear. Marshall left no record, and MacArthur in his memoirs seemed to contradict Hunt’s version of antipathy and the assertion that Marshall “never saw him alone.” MacArthur claimed they had “a long and frank discussion,” but then went on to give a decidedly MacArthur-like spin to it. Marshall, according to MacArthur, “called attention to the paucity of men and materiel I was receiving as compared with all other theaters of war. He said he realized the imbalance and regretted it, but could do little to alter the low priority accorded the area.”

According to MacArthur, Marshall blamed this on King, who supposedly “resented the prominent part I had in the Pacific War” and was “vehement in his personal criticism of me and encouraged Navy propaganda to that end.” By MacArthur’s version, King “had the complete support of the Secretary of the Navy, Knox, the support in general principle of President Roosevelt and his Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy, and in many cases of General Arnold, the head of the Air Force.”²³

This seems disingenuous at best and indicative of MacArthur’s repeated failure to acknowledge the support he received. Knox was definitely pro-navy and a King fan, but Roosevelt had supported MacArthur at critical strategic moments, Arnold had kept Kenney supplied with planes, and Leahy, far from teaming with King in a navy-versus-army tug-of-war, had long since proved that his one and only role on the Joint Chiefs was to represent Roosevelt and not add another navy voice.

Marshall’s potentially dangerous globe-girdling visit to Goodenough Island was the ultimate show of personal support for MacArthur and his Southwest Pacific Area. The very first thing Marshall did upon arriving back at his desk in Washington was to cable MacArthur his “appreciation for the reception you gave me in the Southwest Pacific.”²⁴ Far from being one of the “they” out to get MacArthur, Marshall continually advanced MacArthur’s agenda within the constraints of a global war. In the year ahead, MacArthur would be the beneficiary of both Marshall’s dominance of the Joint Chiefs and Leahy’s growing closeness with Franklin Roosevelt.

In perpetuating the MacArthur myth of having been abandoned and persecuted, however, Frazier Hunt quoted MacArthur as telling an officer after Marshall’s visit: “No theatre commander has ever been kept in such abysmal ignorance by his government as I have been.”25 Those who agree with that assertion would do well, as D. Clayton James so succinctly phrased it, “to ponder the probable fate of MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific offensive if King had been foremost among the Joint Chiefs.”²⁶ MacArthur came away citing Marshall’s visit as evidence that all he thought and held about the navy and Washington was true, but it is really evidence of the support Marshall showed for MacArthur and the Pacific war effort.

Marshall’s visit to MacArthur was one indication of support, but as 1943 ground toward a close, there were many tangible signs that resources of men, ships, planes, and materiel were, and had been, flowing toward the Southwest Pacific Area in staggering numbers. Indeed, despite an Allied policy of Germany First, the entire Pacific theater had more than kept pace with the European theater. Among the reasons were (1) King’s championing of general Pacific operations; (2) Marshall’s specific support of MacArthur; (3) procrastination by the British on a cross-channel invasion commitment; (4) the recognition by the Joint Chiefs that America would not politically tolerate a long war in the Pacific; and (5) a less than enthusiastic British response to sending resources to the China-Burma-India theater. Pacific allocations would fall behind only as deployments to Europe escalated in the buildup for Overlord. As the War Department official history noted, “MacArthur and Nimitz were far from being forced to fight on a shoestring when compared with the European commanders. After two years of war, the balance of U.S. forces between the European and Pacific theaters was fairly even.”²⁷

During the course of 1943, operations in the Pacific—exclusive of activities in Alaska and the China-Burma-India theater but including the invasion of the Gilbert Islands—US Army forces almost doubled, from 350,720 in December of 1942 to 696,847 at the end of 1943. This included thirteen army divisions and one hundred thousand more personnel than planners had estimated would be committed. As evidence of the enormous logistical requirements of delivering and supplying troops across the expanse of the Pacific, for every combat division deployed, twice as many service troops were required for transport and supply.

During the same period, the number of air groups increased from seventeen to thirty-two, and the number of aircraft in the Pacific more than doubled. The largest increase was in medium and light bombers, which Kenney and Whitehead in New Guinea and Halsey’s air commanders in the Solomons used so effectively. These numbers almost quadrupled. Out of the army deployments in the Pacific, Army Air Forces personnel amounted to 162,376, or approximately 23 percent of the total.28

When Alaska and the China-Burma-India theater numbers were added to these, there were 912,942 US Army and Army Air Forces personnel in the Pacific, compared to 1,416,485 in the European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern theaters. US Navy and Marine Corps figures tipped the other way and totaled 965,210 personnel in the Pacific and 393,882 in Europe. Thus total US overseas deployments on December 31, 1943, were 1,878,152 personnel fighting against Japan and 1,810,367 fighting against Germany. By comparison, there were 7,857 aircraft and 713 combat ships in the Pacific and 8,807 aircraft and 515 combat ships in Europe.²⁹

Despite these facts, MacArthur’s standard line remained, as he wrote John O’Laughlin near the close of 1943, that “probably no commander in American history has been so poorly supported.… At times it has looked as though it was intended that I should be defeated.” The only thing more disingenuous was MacArthur’s assertion that he had “absolutely no contacts in the United States” and, despite almost daily messages with Marshall and the War Department, that his “opinions are rarely sought and my advice on important matters given little consideration. My isolation, indeed, is complete.”³⁰

Notwithstanding MacArthur’s chronic complaints, his Southwest Pacific Area’s share of these totals was far from the tail end of a shoestring. Of the approximately seven hundred thousand US Army personnel among SWPA, the South Pacific Area, and the Central Pacific Area, three hundred thousand were in MacArthur’s command—as well as four hundred thousand Australian personnel. US Navy and Marine Corps personnel on shore and on ships in these three areas totaled almost 370,000, with 57,000 assigned to SWPA.31

MacArthur’s aircraft in SWPA totaled 429 bombers, 474 fighters, 234 transports, and 160 reconnaissance and patrol planes from among SWPA, the South Pacific Area, and the Central Pacific Area totals of 1,009 bombers, 1,245 fighters, 359 transports, and 596 reconnaissance and patrol planes.³²

All these numbers did not mean that there were not critical shortages of certain resources in any given theater. The shortage of landing craft plagued all amphibious operations well into 1944 and played a key role in the abandonment of Operation Buccaneer. However, even recognizing late in 1943 that a chronic shortage of ships would continue to affect planning, Marshall and the Joint Chiefs were responsive to MacArthur’s needs within the limits of available resources.

When MacArthur asked the War Department for seventy-one Liberty ships and ten freighters to move 150,000 men and their equipment and supplies as part of Operation Cartwheel, Washington responded with a sixty-day loan of a number of Liberty ships and scraped together various cargo ships to accommodate the bulk of MacArthur’s needs. Sometimes, however, this rapid influx of materiel created other problems because of the lack of adequate port and unloading facilities in the forward areas. In just one example of this, 140 cargo ships clogged Milne Bay in January of 1944 waiting to be unloaded; some of them had been at anchor more than a month.³³

Adequate numbers of landing craft for lighter duty would have been helpful in alleviating these jams as well as stockpiling beachheads, but there never seemed to be enough of them. “It is difficult to state with any certainty,” the War Department official history opined, “why the landing craft deficiency was allowed to develop and grow for so long without interference.” Priorities in producing cargo and antisubmarine vessels, failure to anticipate the amphibious demands of multiple global operations, and an initial flurry of construction that was momentarily deemed adequate all played a role. What is certain is that the shortage affected amphibious operations globally and was not skewed to the detriment of the Southwest Pacific Area.34

The same War Department aide who brought official word to MacArthur of the decision to bypass Rabaul reported back to the Operations Division—likely with MacArthur’s encouragement—that MacArthur could have pressed simultaneous attacks against Saidor and Cape Gloucester shortly after the Finschhafen landing were it not for a lack of adequate shipping in Barbey’s amphibious forces. This discounts the sharp Japanese counterattack against Finschhafen, but it is true that Barbey’s limited number of ships could not be in three or four places—Finschhafen, Saidor, Arawe, and Cape Gloucester—at once. Washington planners took this issue seriously, and Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell, the head of Army Service Forces and the top man in logistical planning, spent five days in SWPA in October of 1943 reviewing requirements.³⁵

Nonetheless MacArthur was certain that powers in Washington begrudged the deployment of landing craft to the Southwest Pacific Area and took it personally. According to Dan Barbey, during the debate over the Cape Gloucester invasion date and the concomitant need for shipping and landing craft, MacArthur growled, “There are some people in Washington, who would rather see MacArthur lose a battle than America win a war.”³⁶

The snag in landing-craft production aside, 1943 proved a record-breaking year for American shipyards. They poured out 19.2 million deadweight tons of oceangoing shipping vessels, more than 2.3 times as much as they produced in 1942. Incredibly, this output might have been even greater had it not been for a steel shortage. In oceangoing merchant shipping, this resulted in a net gain of 15.2 million tons for the year. At the year’s end, the US oceangoing merchant fleet was almost 2.5 times as large as it had been at the start of the European war, in 1939.³⁷

Of the 1,949 ships built in 1943, most were cargo vessels constructed in response to the demands of a two-ocean global war. But 156 of them were combat ships, the most important of which were seven Essex-class aircraft carriers (CVs), nine smaller Independence-class light aircraft carriers (CVLs), and sixteen escort, or “jeep,” carriers (CVEs). Many more were under construction, to be launched in 1944. MacArthur had long pleaded for carriers, and, while none had yet to be placed under Kinkaid’s command, MacArthur and the Southwest Pacific Area would soon be the beneficiaries of this outpouring of American industrial might.38

None of this, however, kept Douglas MacArthur from consistently repeating his refrain of neglect and abandonment. Even as he made inroads in New Guinea and marshaled his forces for leaps toward the Philippines, MacArthur told an old friend from World War I: “No resources and no supplies made the situation precarious from the start. I have done the best I could with what I had, but no commander in American history has so failed of support as here. We have come through, but it has been shoestring stuff.”³⁹

As dramatic as the change was between the end of 1941 and the close of 1942 for the general Allied war effort and for MacArthur personally, the transformation during 1943 was even more so. From the stalemate at Buna, MacArthur’s forces had advanced well beyond Lae and—although it was not his idea—almost completed the bypass of Rabaul. MacArthur was not the only commander to do so, but he had come to embrace wholeheartedly and execute adroitly the combined use of air, sea, and land forces, which was the best argument for unity of command that he could put forth.

With Dan Barbey and Walter Krueger—and soon, Thomas Kinkaid—gaining his confidence and joining George Kenney in his inner circle of field commanders, MacArthur had developed a competent general staff committed to doing his bidding. Only time would tell how well Dick Sutherland continued to fit into that picture and whether Bob Eichelberger would return to MacArthur’s good graces.

Beyond competent personnel and an increase in resources, much of the year’s success could be traced to Ultra. The controversy of its after-action reports aside, the Battle of the Bismarck Sea decisively stopped major Japanese reinforcements from reaching New Guinea. Other Ultra intercepts helped Kenney beat down Japanese airpower over New Guinea and permitted American submarines to prey on Japanese resupply convoys. Growing amphibious resources would soon allow Kinkaid and Barbey to take advantage of Ultra-identified weaknesses in Japan’s widespread defenses for further advances.40

To the north, the central Pacific drive championed by Ernest King and Chester Nimitz had come up against reality on the heavily defended beaches of Tarawa, but the Gilbert Islands were secure and served as a springboard to the Marshall Islands, some 2,500 miles beyond Hawaii. Halsey had yet to complete the capture of Bougainville, in the Solomons, but he was eyeing more island-hopping and had proved both his tenacity and his ability to work with MacArthur.

On the global scale, the Russians had reversed the tide on Germany’s eastern front, Sicily and part of Italy were in Allied hands, and Allied bombers rained destruction on German infrastructure. Tapped to command Overlord, Dwight Eisenhower was quoted as saying that the war in Europe would be over in 1944. Seeking the person who had had the biggest impact on the world in 1943, Time chose chief of staff George C. Marshall as its Man of the Year.

Meanwhile, Douglas MacArthur was as determined as ever to return to the Philippines.