CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Return to Manila
MacArthur had belatedly embraced Bill Halsey’s assessment that Japanese defenses in the central Philippines were largely an empty shell—particularly when it came to airpower—at least in part because the resulting timetable expedited his cherished return to the Philippines. Halsey’s carrier raids in September of 1944 had indeed found what appeared to be waning resistance, but two days after MacArthur waded ashore, Fourteenth Area Army commander Yamashita received orders to muster all forces and destroy the enemy on Leyte. While Yamashita preferred organizing an all-out defense on Luzon, he nonetheless dispatched major reinforcements to Leyte. On October 24, the day before Kurita’s fleet beat a retreat, the Japanese airpower that MacArthur and Halsey had discounted began daily assaults on a scale that MacArthur had not personally experienced since his days on Corregidor.1
After establishing his headquarters at the Price House in Tacloban on October 26—a speedy and almost unprecedented six days after the initial landings—MacArthur witnessed these daily air attacks from its long, covered veranda. The two-story white structure put the controversial “palace” in Hollandia to shame. Built by Walter Scott Price, an American expatriate who had married a Filipina and become a successful Leyte businessman, it was easily the largest and most readily identifiable building in town. The Japanese interned Price as a prisoner of war after they overran the island in 1942 and turned the house into a headquarters. They presumed MacArthur would do the same and consequently made it the target of regular air attacks.
From the second-floor veranda, MacArthur took these raids in stride, calmly smoking his pipe while strolling back and forth. Clearly visible to the rank and file passing in the street below, as well as to those taking shelter in the main headquarters complex across the street, MacArthur displayed the best of his calm Corregidor demeanor and applied it to the front lines, steadily erasing characterizations of Dugout Doug.
His press releases didn’t shy away from bolstering this fearless frontline image. “General MacArthur had one of his narrowest escapes during a recent bombing and strafing attack on American positions in Leyte,” an SWPA press release reported in early November. “A 50 cal. bullet smashed through a window and gouged a deep hole in the wall of the room in which General MacArthur was working—a foot from his head. When his aides rushed in the General was examining the bullet. Smilingly he observed: ‘Not Yet!’”2
The threat didn’t come only from the skies. Between October 23 and December 11, 1944, at least nine Japanese convoys landed on the western coast of Leyte, principally at Ormoc, bringing ashore fifty thousand troops and ten thousand tons of supplies. Instead of minimal resistance, Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army soon faced three divisions, two independent brigades, and elements of two other divisions. Meanwhile, the skies above Leyte were filled with 2,500 planes of the Japanese Fourth Air Army, including the first kamikaze attacks. They frustrated Krueger’s ground assaults, disrupted airfield construction, and wreaked havoc with Allied shipping, which was delivering men and equipment to Leyte Gulf.
The key reason for the success of these Japanese efforts was that for the first time in the long history of MacArthur’s amphibious landings, Kenney’s air force failed to achieve prompt land-based air superiority. Since the early battles on New Guinea, Kenney had quickly provided covering fighter protection from hastily constructed forward airfields, followed closely by bases for medium bombers, in support of every advance MacArthur made. Despite the power of Halsey’s carrier strikes before and after the initial Leyte landings, a number of factors conspired to open a window between those operations and Kenney’s ability to put up a land-based air umbrella.
The first enemy was the weather. Rain, rain, and more rain fell on Leyte and hampered airfield construction. During the first forty days and nights after the invasion, a biblical thirty-five inches of rain fell at Dulag, turning would-be airstrips into quagmires. Then, too, there was Leyte’s geography. Mountainous terrain precluded airfield construction inland, away from the soggy coastal areas. At the same time, the mountains acted as a weather curtain, keeping the rain and the brunt of several typhoons over the Americans, on the eastern coast, while the Japanese, flying from bases in western Leyte and farther away, on Luzon, enjoyed clearer skies en route to their targets.
When two squadrons of P-38s flew north from Morotai and landed at Tacloban on October 27, MacArthur and Kenney greeted them enthusiastically, and MacArthur told Halsey that Kenney’s air forces could take over air operations from his carriers. Concerned about increasing kamikaze attacks and in need of resupply, Halsey was only too glad to rotate his task groups back to Ulithi.
But by November 3, the original thirty-four P-38s were down to twenty, and sometimes they found themselves outnumbered fifteen to one by waves of attacking Japanese. The failure to make more airfields operational and get more fighters into Leyte resulted in almost no air support for Krueger’s ground troops. On November 10, even as American antiaircraft fire slowly took its toll on the attackers, MacArthur and Kenney were forced to admit that they needed Halsey’s fast carriers back on the scene, both to support Krueger’s advance and to pound the airdromes on Luzon from which many of these attacks were staged.3
Krueger’s biggest problem continued to be the influx of Japanese reinforcements landing at Ormoc. In mid-November, he proposed using one of the reserve divisions, the Seventy-Seventh Infantry, to make an amphibious end around so that the troops could land south of Ormoc and close that supply line. Kinkaid’s amphibious forces were still on schedule to land troops at Mindoro, the island due south of Luzon, on December 5, and there was some question as to whether they could mount both operations. The main objection, however, came from naval commanders who feared that Japanese planes, particularly with the increase in kamikaze tactics, might inflict heavy losses. MacArthur ordered Krueger to put the Ormoc plan on hold.4
Leyte, a Sixth Army report on the campaign later concluded, “brought out very strongly, although in a negative way, the vital relationship of air power to the success of the offensive.”5 The US Army Air Forces official history concurred, although it laid the blame at the army’s doorstep. “Not only had the inability of Sixth Army engineers to provide planned air facilities on Leyte cost that army an easy victory,” it reported, “but continued constructional delays threatened to jeopardize the whole schedule of future operations.”6
Leyte proved to be the only major invasion that MacArthur, who had evolved considerably in his perceptions of airpower, launched without the support of adequate land-based air or the ability to develop it within days. As the official history went on to conclude, “the experience at Leyte served to emphasize the soundness of SWPA’s traditional pattern of attack: the advancement of ground, naval, and land-based air forces in coordinated moves, with new beachheads always kept within the normal fighter-escorted bomb line. Carrier-based air power had again demonstrated that it was a superior striking force when operating independently and an acceptable supporting force when properly integrated with land-based aviation, but that it was no suitable substitute for land-based bombers and fighters in the support of a beachhead.”7
As the Leyte operation bogged down, MacArthur chomped at the bit to get to Luzon, but despite his September admonishment to his staff that “you must have me in Lingayen before Christmas,” it wasn’t going to happen. In fact, as the effects of poor air support over Leyte mounted, Admiral Kinkaid strongly recommended that the planned assault on Mindoro on December 5 be postponed even though that would delay the strike against Luzon.
Noting that five weeks had passed since the Leyte landings and there was still no local control of the air, Kinkaid told MacArthur in a five-page memo that the only way to support the Mindoro landings would be to deploy CVEs into the narrow confines of the Sulu Sea. Perhaps smarting from the CVE losses off Leyte, Kinkaid found the risk unacceptable, fearing heavy air attacks as well as enemy surface forces that could not be successfully interdicted without land-based air. Kinkaid concluded his memo by arguing that any operations into Luzon were “entirely outside the realm of feasibility until control of the air in the Philippines is in our hands.” He also suggested, “Even Leyte is far from secure.”8
MacArthur was not pleased. His confrontation with Kinkaid occurred on the morning of November 30 at the Price House. For two hours the general and his admiral argued the case. MacArthur insisted that Japanese air “would cause very little trouble” and that the Mindoro invasion could not be delayed. When Kinkaid returned to the Wasatch, he took the unusual step of drafting an out-of-channels dispatch directly to Admiral King, detailing his reasons for recommending a delay. But before it could be sent—with informational copies to MacArthur and Nimitz, a strategy that might well have resulted in Kinkaid’s dismissal—MacArthur summoned Kinkaid back to the Price House for another round.
MacArthur had just received a diplomatically worded message from Nimitz saying that he had discussed the schedule with Halsey and that a short delay in the Mindoro operation would permit Halsey’s carriers more time at Ulithi to reprovision. That accomplished, they could return on station with a vengeance to pound Japanese air on Luzon in support of both the Mindoro and Lingayen landings. MacArthur stewed about this even as he paced the floor and engaged in another two-hour argument with Kinkaid. Finally, his pontificating done, MacArthur put his hands on Kinkaid’s shoulders. “Tommy, I love you still,” MacArthur told him. “Let’s go to dinner and then send them a cable.”9
The result was that MacArthur postponed the Mindoro landings for ten days, until December 15. Initially, the Lingayen landings on Luzon were also delayed a corresponding ten days, from December 20 until December 30. But Kenney, after closer inspection, wanted more time to develop supporting airfields on Mindoro—with less problems than there had been on Leyte, he hoped—and Kinkaid needed more time to redeploy amphibious forces from one operation to the other. Sutherland added the final straw when he pointed out that the full moon at the end of December would illuminate the Lingayen force’s night movements. Reluctantly, MacArthur told the Joint Chiefs that the Lingayen landings could not occur until January 9, 1945.10
In the long term, these delays in the Philippines had a domino effect on the ships of the Pacific Fleet and on Nimitz’s operations in the central Pacific. Because MacArthur needed Halsey’s fast carriers for air cover—not only for the initial landings but also for some time afterward, until Kenney could establish air bases on Luzon—Nimitz was forced to recommend corresponding delays in his theater. The planned Iwo Jima invasion was postponed from February 3 until February 19. This in turn pushed the landings on Okinawa back until April 1, 1945, a situation the Joint Chiefs had little choice but to accept.11 Far from expediting the fall of Japan, as MacArthur had long maintained they would, Philippine operations were in fact delaying it.
In the short term, the added ten days before the Mindoro assault gave a much-needed respite to the ships of Halsey’s and Kinkaid’s fleets. The biggest beneficiary, however, may have been Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army. Amphibious forces were finally available to take the Seventy-Seventh Infantry Division on its end around by sea to attack Ormoc and close the major avenue of Japanese reinforcements into Leyte. This landing occurred on December 7. The naval landing force suffered heavy casualties, including a destroyer and transport sunk by Japanese air attacks, proving that Kinkaid’s concerns were well founded. But once ashore, the Seventy-Seventh Division rolled along the coast and captured Ormoc three days later. Even before it did so, MacArthur’s daily communiqué grandly announced that the operation had “split the enemy’s forces in two.”12
Before Ormoc fell, General Yamashita had been optimistic about Leyte, even planning an ambitious amphibious counterattack through the shallow waters of Carigara Bay, off Leyte’s northern coast. Afterward, with intelligence reports of the impending Mindoro invasion also in hand, he canceled the operation. On December 19, two days before the long arms of the X and XXIV Corps finally completed their planned encirclement of Leyte north of Ormoc, Yamashita informed his local commander that he would receive no more reinforcements or supplies and that his troops would have to become self-supporting.13
Meanwhile, the Mindoro task force staged in Leyte Gulf and sailed west through Surigao Strait on the night of December 12–13. MacArthur had originally planned to accompany it, as he has done with every major landing since the Admiralties the previous March. But under some pressure from his staff not to expose himself again, he seems to have concluded that because Mindoro was a secondary show when compared to the effort coming at Lingayen, he would wait for the landings on Luzon.
The cruiser Nashville did go, however, as the flagship of Rear Admiral Arthur D. Struble, the attack group commander. Around him were CVEs, old battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and transports laden with twelve thousand combat troops, almost six thousand ground service units, and approximately 9,500 Allied Air Forces personnel. The latter’s task was to have one fighter group operational five days after the landing date—this time MacArthur chose U-day as the designation—with another fighter group, a light bomber group, a tactical reconnaissance squadron, and two commando fighter squadrons in place before the Lingayen landings. There would be no repeat of Leyte.
As this force moved westward on the afternoon of December 13, it sailed near the route over which PT-41 had carried MacArthur almost three years before. Suddenly, unseen by lookouts and undetected by radar, a lone kamikaze darted in low over the water and made for the Nashville. It slammed into the port-side five-inch gun mount. The resulting explosion and fire killed 130 men, wounded 190 more, and turned the flag bridge and combat information center into an inferno. Among the dead was Struble’s chief of staff. Struble transferred his flag to a destroyer, and the Nashville limped back toward Leyte. One can only wonder what might have happened to MacArthur had he been on board.14
The remainder of the task force sailed on toward Mindoro, although for a time the Japanese were uncertain as to its destination, thinking that Panay, Cebu, or Negros were more likely targets. Mindoro was indeed a longer leap straight toward the belly of Luzon, but the value of its airfields was high. As landing craft made for the beaches on the southern tip of the island on the morning of December 15, Japanese aircraft from Clark Field and Davao, on Mindanao—including ever-increasing numbers of kamikazes—resumed aerial attacks. Aircraft from Kinkaid’s CVEs rose to respond and were soon joined by P-38s from Leyte. The CVEs stayed on station a day longer than planned to cover the landing force and beachhead as Halsey’s fast carriers struck airfields on Luzon from the northeast.
Then disaster struck Halsey’s fleet. Heading for a refueling rendezvous so that Halsey could keep his commitment to MacArthur to unleash another series of raids against Luzon on December 19–21, the Third Fleet sailed into the full fury of a deadly typhoon. By the time it blew through, three destroyers had capsized, incurring the loss of most of their crews. Two light carriers suffered minor damage, but a third almost sank when loose aircraft on the hangar deck ignited a firestorm. The toll for the Third Fleet was 790 dead and 156 aircraft destroyed.
Nevertheless, Halsey tried to keep his commitment to MacArthur by steaming west toward Luzon on December 20 before deciding that the damage to his ships demanded his return to Ulithi to regroup and repair. Just as he had after the battles of Leyte Gulf, Halsey came under heavy criticism for his actions and course changes during the typhoon. A court of inquiry later found Halsey accountable for “errors in judgment under stress of war operations,” but in approving the court’s opinion, Nimitz defended him by noting that any such errors stemmed “from a commendable desire to meet military commitments”—that is to say, from the promise both of them had made to MacArthur to support the Mindoro and Lingayen landings at full bore.15
Despite the typhoon, the Allies managed to destroy 450 Japanese planes in the air and on the ground in the Philippines during the first two weeks of December. Once ground troops were ashore on Mindoro, matters were easier for them. The initial landing was unopposed, in large part because the location came as a surprise but also because Yamashita had poured men and resources into the defense of Leyte and was gearing up to do the same on Luzon. As MacArthur had found out in early 1942, Yamashita and his troops simply could not be everywhere.
Now it was almost Christmas in 1944. MacArthur hunkered down at the Price House in Tacloban, tugged at his battered cap in frustration over the delays on Leyte, and prepared to spend his third Christmas in a row without Jean and little Arthur. Jean had been preparing for months to move out of Lennons in Brisbane and return to their penthouse atop the Manila Hotel, but the Allied advance had been slower than MacArthur had expected. The separation from his family, endured since he had bid them good-bye in mid-October, weighed heavily on a man of almost sixty-five—although it was a sacrifice he shared with every rank-and-file soldier, and for him, the separation was of much shorter duration.
Having mentally left Australia for good and being occupied with the upcoming Lingayen landings, MacArthur decided he could not join Jean and Arthur for Christmas. The powers in Washington nonetheless bestowed an unexpected Christmas present.
For some time, there had been talk in Washington circles about creating a five-star grade senior to that of the four stars of a full general or admiral. Admiral King, as a likely recipient on the navy side, had been among those championing the move, while General Marshall, with his usual reticence, remained concerned with weightier matters. On the practical side, a large number of officers in both services had achieved the four-star grade, and Americans routinely came up one star short in their dealings with the five stars of a British field marshal, air marshal, or admiral of the fleet.
On December 14, 1944, Congress finally passed legislation creating the uniquely American grades of general of the army and fleet admiral and authorized four officers of five-star rank on the active rolls of each service. Significantly, the president’s authority to make such appointments, and the grades themselves, terminated six months after the cessation of the current hostilities.16
When President Roosevelt began to award the promotions, the dates at which he did so established seniority. Although he was the least known publicly, Admiral William D. Leahy was arguably the most important man in the ailing president’s White House. There was no question in Roosevelt’s mind that Leahy was the country’s ranking military officer. His appointment as fleet admiral was dated December 15, 1944, and the promotion of the other recipients followed, each one day later than the one before it.
Determined to alternate between navy and army, Roosevelt was equally certain that George Marshall should receive the army’s first five-star grade. Admiral King received the third slot, then Roosevelt looked to the second army appointment. An argument could be made that Roosevelt had a true choice between Dwight Eisenhower and his former superior, Douglas MacArthur, but in reality, politics and public image, far more than MacArthur’s ego, dictated that MacArthur receive his five stars ahead of his one-time aide. Thus, on December 18, 1944, Douglas MacArthur became a general of the army.
The third navy promotion to fleet admiral went to Chester Nimitz, and Eisenhower received his five stars the following day, standing sixth in order of seniority. Roosevelt might have stopped there, but parity with the British on the Combined Chiefs of Staff caused him to award Army Air Forces chief of staff Hap Arnold the seventh set of stars on December 21. The remaining navy slot would not be filled for almost a year. Not without some controversy over his Leyte and typhoon decisions, Bill Halsey was ultimately appointed over Raymond Spruance.
MacArthur immediately sent the president his gratitude. “My grateful thanks for the promotion you have just given me,” MacArthur radioed Roosevelt. “My pleasure in receiving it is greatly enhanced because it was made by you.”17 With no readily available insignia for his new rank, MacArthur had a Filipino silversmith at Tacloban craft two circles of five stars each from a collection of American, Australian, Dutch, and Filipino silver coins. These represented the major national forces serving under his Allied command.
The other message MacArthur rushed to send went to his rear-echelon headquarters in Brisbane, marked FOR IMMEDIATE DELIVERY TO MRS. MACARTHUR. Advising Jean that he had just been appointed general of the army, MacArthur told her, “This promotion has been largely due to the comfort, help and devotion you have so loyally and unstintingly given me.”18
MacArthur’s other surprise just before Christmas in 1944 was not nearly so pleasant. The simmering friction between MacArthur and Sutherland was exploding, ignited by Sutherland’s continuing insubordination over Elaine Bessemer Clarke. Sometime in November, rumors reached MacArthur’s inner circle that Sutherland had ordered engineers to build Clarke a cottage of her own in the maze of offices and barracks under construction south of Tacloban. Roger Egeberg drew the short straw when it came time to tell MacArthur.
The general professed amazement and disbelief, telling Egeberg, “I don’t believe it! I can’t believe it! I told him not to let her come north of Australia, and he knows that!” When MacArthur summoned deputy chief of staff Dick Marshall to confirm the story—Sutherland himself appears not to have been in Tacloban at the time—Marshall denied the rumor. Afterward, Marshall confirmed it to be true and apologized to Egeberg for making him appear to be a rumormonger. In the meantime, however, no one corrected the facts with MacArthur, and for a few weeks the matter sat as uncomfortably as an uninvited guest.19
On November 22, Sutherland told Dusty Rhoades that Clarke would soon be flying with them from Hollandia to Tacloban. Rhoades was aware of the standing agreement that Australian military women would not be deployed in front areas, but he chose not to question Sutherland on the matter. Later, in annotating his diary, Rhoades loyally wrote: “I do not believe Sutherland was informed of the commitment; it is entirely out of character for him to disobey blatantly an order of his commander.”20
But of course that was just the problem. Not only did Sutherland almost certainly know of the prohibition—regardless of the hairsplitting fact that the Australian Clarke was technically serving as an American WAC—but he had also been specifically ordered by MacArthur to keep Clarke out of the front lines during their earlier confrontation at Hollandia.
Clarke didn’t end up joining Sutherland on his flight in a B-24 to Tacloban—perhaps, Rhoades speculated, because Sutherland had straitlaced Stephen Chamberlin, MacArthur’s operations chief, along on the flight. Nonetheless, on November 30, Clarke was among the passengers Sutherland ordered Rhoades to fly north on another run between Hollandia and Tacloban. This time, Rhoades was at the controls of MacArthur’s personal B-17, the Bataan.21
The news that Clarke was in the Philippines reached MacArthur’s headquarters when Clarke herself telephoned and spoke with Larry Lehrbas. Clarke seemed to be almost baiting MacArthur by announcing her presence. Lehrbas, Bonner Fellers, and Roger Egeberg held a hurried conference, and once again Egeberg was elected to deliver the news to MacArthur.
Egeberg waited until that evening after supper when MacArthur was smoking his pipe as usual on the veranda of the Price House. As Egeberg struggled to find a casual way to bring up the topic, MacArthur suddenly turned to him and asked, “Say, Doc, whatever happened to that woman?”
Egeberg feigned surprised and replied, “Woman? What woman, General?”
“Oh, you know, that woman,” MacArthur answered. When Egeberg told him that Clarke was just down the coast in her cottage, MacArthur exploded with a shout loud enough to be heard up and down the street. “Get me Dick!” MacArthur angrily commanded Egeberg.22
Egeberg passed that unpleasant assignment to one of the headquarters clerks, and when Sutherland appeared on the veranda, MacArthur launched into a tirade that was both very uncharacteristic and very public. Officers and enlisted men up and down the street and in neighboring buildings saw and heard MacArthur dress down his chief of staff. Sutherland retreated to his office, but MacArthur was not finished with him.
According to chief clerk Paul Rogers, who had been with both men since prewar Manila, MacArthur marched into Sutherland’s office and towered over him as Sutherland sat at his desk. “Dick Sutherland,” MacArthur raged, “I gave you an order. You disobeyed it. You are relieved of your command. You are under arrest.” Rogers, who was standing in the rear doorway to Sutherland’s office, quickly backed away as the two generals exchanged more heated words.23
Within hours of their stormy confrontation, Sutherland wrote out a five-page letter to Dusty Rhoades, who had arguably been his closest confidant save Elaine Clarke herself. Sutherland instructed Rhoades to return Clarke to Australia and see to her welfare. As for his own future, Sutherland told Rhoades that MacArthur had temporarily relieved him of his duties. He denied that he had known of the prohibition against Australian women at the front, then instructed Rhoades to destroy the letter, which Rhoades did.24
MacArthur never put Sutherland’s reprimands in writing, but it was clear that Sutherland’s days of speaking for MacArthur were over. Assistant chief of staff Dick Marshall assumed more and more responsibility and power. MacArthur again rejected Sutherland’s requests for reassignment. MacArthur may well have thought such an exit far too easy on Sutherland and chose to keep him close at hand, still as nominal chief of staff, but with everyone at his headquarters well aware that his power had been shorn. That MacArthur was soon conversing with him again as if nothing had changed—albeit on matters of lesser substance—only increased his sense of exile.25
When Rhoades returned to Tacloban on December 29, he gave Sutherland a lengthy account of Clarke’s weepy and emotional return to Brisbane. Afterward, Sutherland started into a long conversation with him about MacArthur, blaming MacArthur’s actions on the general’s frustrations with the pace of the Leyte campaign. “Sutherland said MacArthur’s mood was much like it had been in the early days of the New Guinea campaign,” Rhoades remembered, “when progress had been slow and disappointing. MacArthur wanted to get on to Luzon and Manila and the delays had been most distressing to him, increasing his impatience.”26 That much of what Sutherland said was probably true.
In MacArthur’s mind, his pledge of returning to the Philippines would not be fulfilled until he reentered Manila. First, of course, he had to get out of Leyte. After Ormoc fell, Japanese resistance on Leyte was doomed, but much heavy fighting remained to be done around a handful of fiercely defended pockets, particularly in the hills above the Ormoc Valley, on Leyte’s western thumb.
On the day after Christmas in 1944, MacArthur rushed, as usual, to declare victory and move on. “The Leyte-Samar campaign can now be regarded as closed except for minor mopping-up,” MacArthur’s communiqué announced. “General Yamashita has sustained perhaps the greatest defeat in the military annals of the Japanese Army.”27
That same day, Eichelberger’s Eighth Army assumed command of operations on Leyte, relieving Krueger’s Sixth Army and thus permitting it to prepare for the invasion of Luzon. “This closes a campaign that has had few counterparts in the utter destruction of an enemy’s forces with a maximum conservation of our own,” MacArthur wrote Krueger in congratulation.28
Some of that may have been true. The entire Leyte campaign cost the US Army 3,504 men; almost twelve thousand were wounded. Estimates of Japanese strength on Leyte—and the number of men killed—vary: there were very few wounded and captured. Assessments range from 56,263 killed and 389 captured as of December 26 to upwards of eighty thousand killed over the course of the entire campaign.29
But the Leyte campaign was far from over when Eichelberger and the Eighth Army took charge. MacArthur’s “minor mopping-up” became, as the unit history of the Eleventh Airborne Division reported, “bitter, exhausting, rugged fighting—physically, the most terrible we were ever to know.”30 Eichelberger estimated that the Eighth Army killed more than twenty-seven thousand Japanese troops between December 26, 1944, and the end of hostilities, in May of 1945.
“I never understood the public relations policy that either [MacArthur] or his immediate assistants established,” Eichelberger wrote after the war. “It seemed to me, as it did to many of the commanders and correspondents, ill advised to announce victories when a first phase had been accomplished without too many casualties. Too often, as at Buna and Sanananda, as on Leyte, Mindanao, and Luzon, the struggle was to go on for a long time.”31
But MacArthur was moving forward and headed for Manila. In December of 1941, he had predicted that the invading Japanese would land in Lingayen Gulf and strike south across the Central Luzon Plain. Three years later, as the attacker, MacArthur hoped to surprise Yamashita by coming ashore someplace less obvious. Lingayen’s geography, however, was compelling. It had the advantages of wide beaches, protected waters, and, perhaps tellingly, a straight shot toward the Philippine capital.
Despite the unexpected flow of Japanese troops and aircraft into the Leyte campaign, it seemed logical that Ultra information, coupled with reports from Filipino guerrillas, would provide a reliable estimate of enemy forces awaiting MacArthur and Krueger on Luzon. The problem, however, was that calculations made by MacArthur’s and Krueger’s staffs based on the intelligence differed widely and made one wonder if they were analyzing the same thing.32
Willoughby analyzed Ultra intercepts and reduced his estimate for enemy troops on Luzon from 158,900 in October to barely 137,000 at the end of November. This was in part because he thought the reinforcements sent to Leyte had stripped Luzon of Yamashita’s best units. He did not, however, adequately take into account new units arriving undetected in the Philippines from as far away as Manchuria. Non-Ultra sources, principally guerrilla reports, suggested that between 115,000 and 140,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors were on Luzon.
Krueger’s Sixth Army G-2 chief, Colonel Horton White, read the same intelligence but concluded that there was a minimum of 234,500 Japanese troops on Luzon at the beginning of December. He theorized that if guerrillas had reported the presence of certain units that had slipped into the Philippines undetected by Ultra, there might well be more of them that both sources had overlooked. As it turned out, the actual number of Japanese was 267,000. As valuable of a tool as Ultra intelligence had become, it was not omniscient, and, ultimately, its utility had much to do with its analysts.33
As the Lingayen attack force took to its ships early in January of 1945, Willoughby revised his estimates of opposition upward to 172,000, but by then the number of actual Japanese forces had increased to 287,000. Arrayed against this, Krueger planned to commit 203,000 combat and service troops, which would soon be augmented by reinforcements and organized guerrilla units so that the total would exceed 280,000.
While these American troops did not equal the number of US Army ground forces engaged in western Europe at the time, the Luzon campaign employed the equivalent of fifteen divisions and was by far the largest deployment of the Pacific war. The initial Lingayen assault and those ancillary landings to come near Manila included more US Army ground combat and service forces than earlier operations in North Africa, Italy, and southern France. Luzon was larger than the entire Allied commitment against Sicily. Certainly it far outnumbered the forces used in the Japanese invasion of the Philippines in 1941–1942, when the Japanese landed the equivalent of four divisions.34
As for supplies and shipping, MacArthur soon received a reprimand from Marshall saying that cargo vessels arriving in his theater were taking too long to unload and return. The chief of staff’s office counted 446 such ships within the Southwest Pacific Area, of which 113 were either loading or discharging, 102 were idle waiting to load or discharge, 62 were servicing or repairing, and 169 were en route. “You have previously been requested to invoke extraordinary measures to improve the shipping turnaround,” Marshall reminded MacArthur. “Global commitments cannot sustain this extraordinary tax against shipping effectiveness [and] your future operations and those in other theatres are already being penalized by shipping shortages.”35
Given those numbers of men, materiel, and ships, it is difficult to see how MacArthur could argue with a straight face and dose of self-righteousness that the Pacific in general and his Southwest Pacific Area in particular were still being habitually shortchanged.
During the first eight days of January in 1945, Halsey’s carriers pounded Japanese air bases on Luzon as well as Formosa to prevent an influx of reinforcements and direct attacks from the latter. On January 4, MacArthur and his key personal staff, including Roger Egeberg and Larry Lehrbas, boarded the light cruiser Boise with no expectation that they would be returning to Tacloban. MacArthur had every intention of establishing his headquarters ashore on Lingayen Gulf as soon as possible.
“Dearest Jeannie,” MacArthur wrote to his wife in longhand from the Boise on the night of January 8. “This is my ‘ships’ letter to tell you about the voyage. To begin with the Boise is the most comfortable cruiser on which I have travelled. The suite I occupy is much larger, has artificial ventilation, and better cooking than the others.” MacArthur went on to describe what he termed “the suiciders” who had been harrying the convoy and admitted that he would “be glad to come to battle grips on land [where] I believe I have him but will not know definitely until I test his strength.”36
Kamikazes had indeed taken a toll on the landing force and on Jesse Oldendorf’s supporting group of battleships and CVEs. The escort carrier Ommaney Bay sank, and the battleship New Mexico took a direct hit on its bridge that killed its commanding officer as well as Winston Churchill’s personal representative to MacArthur. The Boise itself narrowly dodged two torpedoes fired from midget submarines off Mindoro, yet during the continuing kamikaze attacks MacArthur insisted on staying near the quarterdeck to stare intently at Corregidor and Bataan as they appeared in the distance to starboard. “I could not leave the rail,” MacArthur later confessed.37
By the morning of January 9, nearly one thousand ships were spread across Lingayen Gulf. Yamashita offered no resistance on the beaches, but kamikaze attacks continued to take their toll on the waters. Lieutenant General Oscar Griswold’s XIV Corps of the Thirty-Seventh and Fortieth Infantry Divisions went ashore between Lingayen and Dagupan, and by nightfall they had both towns and the Lingayen airfield under their control. Meanwhile, the Sixth and Forty-Third Infantry Divisions of Major General Innis Swift’s I Corps bracketed San Fabian, to the east. The Sixth Division rolled inland for more than three miles, but the Forty-Third began to receive pressure from the adjacent hills. This gave Krueger pause and suggested that Yamashita might launch a massive assault on his left flank. Those concerns would soon put Krueger at odds with MacArthur’s timetable.
Four hours after the first assault waves, MacArthur judged it was his turn to go ashore. That MacArthur could even make such landing-zone excursions—as he had done since the Admiralties—spoke volumes about his leadership team. It is to MacArthur’s credit as a leader that he generally picked competent subordinates, delegated responsibility, and trusted them to produce results.
This was particularly true of Kenney and Ennis Whitehead in air operations, Dan Barbey in amphibious operations, and Dick Marshall as his deputy chief of staff. MacArthur ranted and railed from time to time against both Krueger and Eichelberger, but they proved competent field commanders. Then, of course, there was Sutherland. MacArthur might have been better off had someone with less of an alter-ego personality been his chief of staff, but theirs had been a mutually sustaining relationship until Sutherland forced MacArthur to reassert himself.
Had MacArthur not had this support group of capable staff and field commanders, he could not have disappeared into radio silence while aboard ships en route to landing zones. He liked to say that he needed to see the action firsthand to understand what he was up against, but such excursions cost him some measure of command and control. Thanks to his leadership team, he was able to do so without seriously compromising his command’s ability to accomplish its mission.