CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Sixty Minutes from Defeat

As MacArthur flew to Port Moresby and then on to Brisbane after his testy encounter with Sutherland, he was coming off of a grand total of four nights at Hollandia—two en route to Morotai and two upon his return. He would spend an additional night there on October 15 en route to Leyte.¹ Given his schedule, MacArthur barely had time to look around his headquarters building let alone enjoy the view from its veranda. Yet this structure would bring MacArthur’s critics considerable glee and provide strong evidence that those out to disparage MacArthur were determined to do so no matter how ridiculous or trumped-up the charges.

In the first place, it was Sutherland, not MacArthur, who ordered the building’s construction. There was a need for a headquarters structure that would serve as quarters for MacArthur, Sutherland, and ranking visitors as well as provide the generals with private offices, conference facilities, a dining room, and office space for support staff. In this respect, it was functionally similar to the Port Moresby facilities.

Yet as construction battalions worked nonstop to turn the Hollandia area into a forward base for operations against the Philippines, rumors began to circulate that MacArthur had ensconced himself in a palatial residence overlooking Lake Sentani and was living the life of a tropical sultan. Such rumors were reminiscent of the Dugout Doug characterizations, but they had far less basis in fact. MacArthur’s so-called million-dollar mansion was in fact three prefabricated houses joined together and painted a bright white against the tropical heat. Basic sofas, chairs, and some rugs shipped from Brisbane added comfort, but it was a far cry from palatial.2

To be sure, many of MacArthur’s associates commented favorably on the structure, but this seems to have been largely an echo of the old real estate saw about “location, location, location.” Kenney, who described Kinkaid’s headquarters, around a half mile away, as “quite a lot better” and his own as smaller but “very livable,” admitted that “perhaps the scenery had something to do with our feeling of comfort.” Of necessity, because Kenney’s airfields took up the flat ground, these structures were built on the slopes of the Cyclops Mountains, from which one could look south to the azure waters of Lake Sentani or north over the sea in the direction of Mindanao. On the slopes above, a tall waterfall cut a swath through the verdant green of the surrounding hills.³

Compared to many of the locations around the globe in which Allied servicemen fought and died, Hollandia appeared to be a picture-postcard paradise. Had MacArthur slept in a slit trench he likely would have come under some criticism for just being in such a beautiful locale. There is no doubt that MacArthur’s general demeanor and regal bearing routinely set him up for criticism, but he was not guilty of building a palatial retreat at Hollandia.

According to Sid Huff, even Jean MacArthur, who by some reports was also supposed to be living there, couldn’t help but chide the general a little. “When I go to Manila,” Jean told MacArthur, “I want you to fix it so I can stop off at Hollandia. I want to see that mansion you built there—the one where I am supposed to have been living in luxury!”⁴ The greatest irony of this entire story is that MacArthur spent only five nights there, and they were far from happy ones, first because of the friction with Sutherland and then because of his anxiety over the imminent landings at Leyte.

The island of Leyte is a curious tangle of geography. Located on the eastern side of the Philippine archipelago, roughly two-thirds of the way from the northern tip of Luzon to the southernmost point of Mindanao, it is around 120 miles from north to south and between forty and a dozen miles wide at various points. North of its narrow waist, a range of four-thousand-foot mountains divides east from west and complicates transit. On the coast east of those mountains, the waters of wide Leyte Gulf are protected on the north by Samar and to the south by the Dinagat Islands. Key water passages nearby are San Bernardino Strait, past Samar to the north, and Surigao Strait, between southern Leyte and Mindanao to the south.

Even with reports of weak resistance and the expedited time schedule, the Leyte landings promised to be the largest and most complicated undertaken up to that point in the Southwest Pacific Area. “Leyte,” MacArthur later wrote in his memoirs, “was to be the anvil against which I hoped to hammer the Japanese into submission in the central Philippines, the springboard from which I could proceed to the conquest of Luzon, for the final assault against Japan itself.”5

The first order of business was to coordinate air support from Halsey’s carriers until Kenney could construct or rehabilitate airfields on Leyte for land-based air. One of Admiral King’s final arguments against the Lingayen landings on Luzon had been that a December 20 target date was likely to require the offshore presence of Halsey’s fleet, particularly the Task Force 38 carriers, for six weeks in order to control Formosa airfields and oppose any attack on the beachhead by the enemy fleet.⁶ The more immediate needs at Leyte presented the same two problems—beating down Japanese air and anticipating the Japanese fleet—except that the airfields of concern to Leyte operations were on Luzon and much closer than Formosa.

Nimitz had been prompt to promise MacArthur support—both in terms of troops and carriers—almost immediately after Halsey suggested expediting the timeline. “Delighted to be able to assist in your return to the Philippines,” Nimitz signaled MacArthur. “This is your show and I stand ready to help in any way practicable to make it a complete success.”⁷ Nonetheless, the deployments and logistics of the army and the navy, as well as their coordination, would be daunting.

On MacArthur’s side, there was little question but that Krueger’s Sixth Army would conduct the assault. Krueger’s team had worked closely with Admirals Kinkaid and Barbey in the frenzied amphibious assaults that had taken place since Cape Gloucester. They were primed and ready to go. Krueger was irritated, however, because MacArthur had kept Eichelberger waiting in the wings for a year prior to his corps command at Hollandia—not only as a reprimand to Eichelberger for his post-Buna publicity but also as a veiled threat to Krueger. The subtext was that Krueger could be replaced at MacArthur’s whim if he didn’t move as expeditiously as MacArthur decreed.

By the summer of 1944, sufficient numbers of American troops were pouring into the Southwest Pacific Area to warrant the creation of another army under MacArthur’s SWPA command. (Generally, two or more divisions operated as a corps; two or more corps comprised an army.) When the Eighth Army was activated on September 9, 1944, Eichelberger assumed command. According to Eichelberger, Krueger was upset not so much by Eichelberger’s role but by the fact that another army existed to challenge the importance and operational assignments of Krueger’s Sixth Army. It would take some months for the Eighth Army to be ready to deploy, however, and at Leyte, the Sixth Army would have the field to itself.8

Code-named Operation King-Two by MacArthur’s planners and issued by MacArthur on September 20, the Leyte plan was based on the assumption that Japanese land and air forces in the Philippines had been seriously crippled and that the Imperial Japanese Navy would elect to remain largely in home waters. It was further assumed that Japanese army strength was limited to one division, which, while well supplied, would soon find itself largely cut off from reinforcements and incoming deliveries.⁹

With MacArthur as supreme commander, Admiral Kinkaid would command all amphibious operations and forces ashore until such time as the beachheads were secure and General Krueger took command of the ground troops—a structure that had evolved and worked well during prior operations. Krueger’s Sixth Army was composed of Major General Franklin Sibert’s X Corps of the First Cavalry Division and Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division and Major General John Hodge’s XXIV Corps, on loan from Nimitz and comprising the Seventh and Ninety-Sixth Infantry Divisions. Counting the Thirty-Second and Seventy-Seventh Infantry Divisions, held in reserve, assorted tank and amphibious truck and tractor battalions, and attached service units, around two hundred thousand ground troops were committed to the Leyte operation.

These units were no longer green troops but battle-tested. The First Cavalry and Twenty-Fourth Infantry Divisions had fought for MacArthur in the Admiralties and at Hollandia respectively. The Seventh Division included veterans of Attu, in the Aleutians, and Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands. The Thirty-Second had been bloodied in New Guinea, and the Seventy-Seventh had taken part in the capture of Guam. Only the Ninety-Sixth Infantry Division lacked combat experience.10

Krueger held Sibert in particularly high esteem as a “cool and very aggressive” commander, and he assigned Sibert’s X Corps the crucial first-day task of seizing the port facilities and the airfield near Tacloban. Hodge and his XXIV Corps would land twenty miles to the south and seize airfields around Dulag. The plan then called for these two forces to move away from each other—something that caused Krueger some concern—circle the mountains dividing northern Leyte, and finally link up at Ormoc, on the western coast.¹¹

On the navy side, there were two key players: Admiral Kinkaid, commander of Allied Naval Forces in the Southwest Pacific Area, essentially the US Seventh Fleet, and Admiral Halsey, commander of the US Third Fleet. There was also a critical supporting cast. Kinkaid gave Dan Barbey’s VII Amphibious Force the task of delivering Sibert’s X Corps and assigned Rear Admiral Theodore Wilkinson’s III Amphibious Force to do the same for Hodge’s XXIV Corps. Rear Admiral Jesse Oldendorf commanded a bombardment and fire support group of older battleships that would soften up the landing zones. No one dreamed they would also engage in the last great clash of battleship against battleship.

Halsey had clear instructions from Nimitz to support the Leyte landings with air cover from his carriers, but should an opportunity present itself to destroy major portions of the Japanese fleet, that was to become his primary task. In that event and all others, it was assumed that Halsey and MacArthur would do whatever was necessary to coordinate their operations.¹²

By any measure, the combined naval strength of Kinkaid’s and Halsey’s fleets was staggering. Kinkaid’s attack force, officially designated Task Force 77, totaled 738 ships, ranging from Oldendorf’s battleships to transports and landing craft. Halsey’s Third Fleet totaled 105 combat vessels, including the eighteen carriers of Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher’s fast carrier task force, officially Task Force 38. The combined forces totaled slightly fewer ships than the armada that had just assembled off Normandy, but considering its battleships and carriers, it packed a stronger punch in terms of firepower. The logistics of getting men and materiel to the beachheads were no less staggering. The Leyte invasion force embarked from nine staging bases scattered across MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific and Nimitz’s South and Central Pacific Areas: Oro Bay, Finschhafen, Manus, Hollandia, Biak, the island of Noemfoor, Morotai, Guam, and Oahu.13

In personal preparation for this massive undertaking, MacArthur spent a few days resting up with his family. As Dusty Rhoades remembered, the pilot had little flying to do because “General Sutherland is not here to crack the whip, and General MacArthur is doing the unheard-of thing of taking a rest.” MacArthur even indulged in the luxury of taking several long afternoon drives with Jean and Arthur. They were good company, and in addition to the relaxation this time provided, MacArthur also seems to have wanted the peace of mind and the experience of a pleasant and memorable good-bye should the unthinkable happen to him during his intended walk on the Leyte beaches.¹⁴

MacArthur also said another good-bye that was almost as poignant. Australian prime minister John Curtin was dying of heart disease and likely would not live out the war. Regardless, MacArthur had made it clear that once he departed Australia for the Philippines, he did not intend to return. His next stop would be Japan. Accordingly, on September 30, Rhoades flew MacArthur from Brisbane to Canberra so that he might say good-bye to Curtin. Their relationship had become wary, particularly on Curtin’s side, and it had always been characterized by the perfunctory words of necessary allies more than by any genuine personal warmth. But together they had nonetheless turned Australia from tempting target into offensive bastion, and their parting had a touch of melancholy for both men.¹⁵

MacArthur returned to Brisbane that same afternoon and spent the next two weeks in final preparations for the big push north. On October 14, Rhoades flew him to Port Moresby for a night and then on to Hollandia the next day. “Dearest Jeannie,” MacArthur wrote that evening, “I was glad to leave Moresby—it was like looking at the skeleton of an old friend. I am sending you a blossom from there which I plucked as I left it forever.”

Saying they were leaving Hollandia “tomorrow after breakfast,” he noted that “Sutherland is going along although I do not know his future plans”—a rather revealing admission regarding one’s own chief of staff, indicative of their growing divide. “I miss you both,” MacArthur concluded to Jean, “and send you all love and devotion. Each day now that I am gone brings a day nearer our reunion.… God bless you both.”16 The next morning, he went aboard the cruiser Nashville and was soon embarked on his greatest crusade.¹⁷

“We came to Leyte just before midnight of a dark and moonless night,” MacArthur later wrote in his memoirs. “The stygian waters below and the black sky above seemed to conspire in wrapping us in an invisible cloak, as we lay to and waited for dawn before entering Leyte Gulf.”¹⁸ It was the wee hours of October 20, 1944—what MacArthur had chosen to call A-day because the generic designation D-day had quickly come to refer almost exclusively to the Normandy landings.

Three days before, rangers had seized the islands dotting the wide entrance to Leyte Gulf and installed navigation lights on them. At dawn on the twentieth, the Nashville joined an array of ships entering the gulf, and as the transports took up positions in preparation for disgorging their cargoes of men and munitions, the battleships and cruisers began a ferocious barrage. The Nashville anchored around two miles off the beaches of the X Corps sector, and MacArthur took a front-row seat on its bridge.

It was a decidedly American show. MacArthur seems to have gone out of his way, both politically and operationally, to exclude his Australian allies. “Without Australian political, logistic and military support it is hard to see how MacArthur could have made this grand return,” Australian historian John Robertson wrote after the war, “but no Australian land or air-force unit, and no Australian notables, were there to share the glory.”¹⁹

Midmorning, the assault waves of four divisions poured ashore as planned. The heavy naval bombardment had driven most defenders inland, and initial resistance was light. According to Kinkaid, “The execution of the plan was as nearly perfect as any commander could desire.” By 1:00 p.m., MacArthur decided that it was time to head for shore himself along with Philippine president Sergio Osmeña, Quezon having finally succumbed to tuberculosis that summer. Mortar and small-arms fire could still be heard coming from the direction of the highway leading to Tacloban and the nearby hills.

MacArthur was dressed in a crisply pressed set of fresh khakis beneath his ever-present field marshal’s cap and did not intend to wade through knee-deep water, although he appears to have gone through that and more in the Admiralties and on Morotai. Still, as the Nashville’s launch neared the beach south of Tacloban with a contingent that included Sutherland, Kenney, Egeberg, Rhoades, and Lehrbas, the sandy bottom sloped too gently for the launch to get close enough to shore to permit a dry landing.

One of MacArthur’s aides radioed the beachmaster, who was preoccupied with the confusion of hundreds of landing craft unloading amid incoming sniper fire, and requested an amphibious craft to take MacArthur’s party the remaining distance to dry ground. Supposedly the otherwise occupied beachmaster angrily replied, “Let ’em walk.”

They did just that—pressed khakis or not—and MacArthur’s grim expression, recorded in photographs, may have been partly attributable to his disgruntlement over the gruff treatment. Subsequently, of course, MacArthur recognized the huge public relations value of the photographs, and splashing ashore became standard operating procedure. Hints of disgruntlement were considered to be determined looks of destiny and the absolute antithesis of Dugout Doug’s image.20

As MacArthur and his entourage made one of his by-then-patented beachhead strolls, a gentle afternoon rain began to fall. Then signal corps troops drove up in a weapons carrier at an appointed place in a little clearing carrying a portable transmitter. It would relay MacArthur’s soon-to-be-historic words to a larger transmitter on the Nashville, which in turn would broadcast them to the world.

“People of the Philippines,” MacArthur began, his voice as well as his hands uncharacteristically shaking with emotion, “I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God, our forces stand again on Philippine soil.” Rally to me, he went on to admonish. “Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on.”21 Shrewdly recognizing that in such situations shorter was definitely better than longer, he finished in just two minutes. Osmeña then spoke for ten minutes about restoring civil government in the islands, a task that would prove both complicated and controversial.

After the addresses, MacArthur and his party returned to the Nashville. By then, the Japanese defenders had recovered from their initial shock and were counterattacking. According to Kenney, shortly after MacArthur departed, Japanese troops broke through to the beach and got within yards of the spot where MacArthur had stood. “It was a good thing we left when we did,” Kenney recalled.²²

As with so many of the dramatic moments of MacArthur’s life, much would be written—both approvingly and critically—of MacArthur’s splashing ashore and subsequent words at Leyte. Even the indisputable fact that he had landed on A-day would be questioned, in part because he made landings in other sectors in the days that followed, starting with the First Cavalry Division’s sector, near Tacloban, on October 21. That same day, Krueger, Sibert, and Hodge established their headquarters ashore, and Kinkaid turned over command of the beachheads to them.²³

As the troops fought their way forward, MacArthur’s press machine unleashed its own salvos. A special communiqué on October 20—released even as the first waves of Americans went ashore—noted the northward leap of six hundred miles from Morotai and 2,500 miles from Milne Bay almost sixteen months before and said that this landing midway between Luzon and Mindanao “at one stroke splits in two [the] Japanese forces in the Philippines.” It caused the enemy “to be caught unawares in Leyte” because of the expectation of an attack in Mindanao. MacArthur was said to be “in personal command of the operation.”²⁴

While MacArthur’s press release the next day again noted that he was “in personal command of the invasion of the Philippines,” this release was effusive in naming the supporting cast. It mentioned Krueger and each of his corps and division commanders; Kinkaid and the commander of the Australian naval squadron, John Collins; Halsey and his carrier task force commander, Marc Mitscher; and amphibious commanders Dan Barbey and Theodore Wilkinson. This listing was more strong evidence that MacArthur’s public relations efforts had evolved toward the collective rather than the “MacArthur, MacArthur, MacArthur” that was the subject of jokes in 1942.25

Of course the accolades that flowed in to the Southwest Pacific Area in return came first and foremost to MacArthur. “The whole American Nation today exults at the news that the gallant men under your command have landed on Philippine soil,” President Roosevelt cabled him. “I know well what this means to you. I know what it cost you to obey my order that you leave Corregidor in February 1942, and proceed to Australia. Ever since then you have planned and worked and fought with whole-souled devotion for the day when you would return.”²⁶ That day had come.

Bill Halsey, whose fast carriers of the Third Fleet had pounded Japanese bases from Mindanao to Formosa in anticipation of the Leyte landings, led the cheers from the navy side. “It was a great day for your fleet team-mates when the successful landing of the 6th Army was announced,” Halsey signaled MacArthur the day after the initial landings. “It was a beautifully conceived and executed plan—and now that you have a foothold we are all primed to assist in every way in the succeeding steps which will finally wipe out the enemy garrison in the Philippines.”²⁷

As it turned out, Halsey’s words were about to be put to the test. Japan had long ago decided that both its army and navy must make a do-or-die stand in the Philippines. On land, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, Japan’s celebrated “Tiger of Malaya,” had been recalled from Manchuria to assume command of the Fourteenth Area Army and confront Krueger’s advance. But in the short term, MacArthur faced a far more ominous threat from the sea. The Imperial Japanese Navy was finally sortieing in full strength.

Two days after MacArthur landed on Leyte, two American submarines, Darter and Dace, made contact in the South China Sea with what appeared to be a major Japanese naval force headed for the central Philippines. Most Japanese leaders believed that their only hope of saving the Philippines and ultimately keeping the Allies out of their home islands was to achieve one great and decisive naval victory. That such an encounter between massive fleets would inevitably occur had been premised on both sides for decades. The Japanese hoped to re-create their 1905 triumph over the Russians at Tsushima. For the Americans, destroying the Japanese fleet en masse while crossing the Pacific had been the cornerstone of multiple Orange plans.

Japan had little choice but to make a last stand in the Philippines. According to Admiral Soemu Toyoda, commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, the loss of the Philippines would cut the Japanese lifeline to the East Indies. If Toyoda’s fleet stayed in home waters, it could not obtain fuel from refineries in Borneo. If it remained south of Allied air in the Philippines, it could not resupply from Japan. Consequently, Toyoda testified after the war, “There would be no sense in saving the fleet at the expense of the loss of the Philippines.” Thus Japan planned to repulse MacArthur’s landings at Leyte and hope for a decisive surface engagement with the American fleet.28

To attempt to do so, Toyoda and his planners crafted a complicated four-pronged offensive that dwarfed Japan’s earlier operations at Pearl Harbor, the Coral Sea, and even Midway. Since the latter battle, the closest thing to a concerted action had been Japan’s massing of ships in the Philippine Sea to oppose the Marianas invasion. Partly because Spruance resolutely chose to defend the beachheads, that encounter had taken place largely via aircraft and had not resulted in the surface duel among battleships that some strategists on both sides still anticipated.

MacArthur, Kinkaid, King, Nimitz, and Halsey would soon have to answer questions about divided command on the American side, but from the start, Toyoda’s master plan posed complicated command and control issues for the Japanese. With Toyoda exercising overall strategic direction from southern Formosa, four independent task forces converged on Leyte from different points of the compass. Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa’s Main Force (which the Americans called the Northern Force) assembled in Japan’s Inland Sea and steamed south. It consisted of one large carrier, three light carriers, two cruisers, and a dozen destroyers. Lacking full complements of aircraft for his carriers because of the decimation off the Marianas, Ozawa was determined to draw Halsey and the Third Fleet away from the Leyte beachheads, something he had been unable to do against Spruance.