CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Hail the Conquering Hero

The day after Douglas MacArthur issued his premature capture-of-Manila communiqué, he made an emotional visit to the Bilibid prison, in the northern section of the city. There he found around eight hundred military prisoners who had somehow survived the deprivations of three long years of captivity. “The men who greeted me,” MacArthur wrote in his memoirs, “were scarcely more than skeletons.” Those who could stand dragged themselves to a semblance of attention and offered a quiet “You’re back” or “You made it.” Yes, MacArthur acknowledged, “I’m a little late, but we finally came.”¹

These sobering encounters, however, did not stop MacArthur from planning a triumphant victory parade through the streets of Manila. Following directly behind his own jeep were to be those surviving members of his Bataan Gang. Sutherland took exception to this and insisted that the planning staff, which had done the work to effect the return, take precedence instead. It was a trifling point, and Paul Rogers concluded that Sutherland, whose relationship with MacArthur could hardly have sunk lower than it was at that point, pressed it only to goad MacArthur. As it turned out, a confrontation never occurred because the conqueror’s parade was postponed indefinitely after it became clear that capturing the remainder of Manila would require grim block-by-block fighting.²

As elements of the Thirty-Seventh Infantry Division crossed the Pasig River and advanced toward the center of Manila, MacArthur remained convinced that he could take the city largely intact. Only reluctantly did he permit artillery fire within Manila, and he steadfastly forbade air attacks. When Krueger pressed him on the air ban in mid-February, particularly against heavily entrenched Japanese troops in the old walled Intramuros district, MacArthur termed air attacks on a city occupied “by a friendly and allied population” as “unthinkable.”3

But the unthinkable occurred nonetheless when upwards of one hundred thousand Filipinos lost their lives over the course of the battle for the city. Many were raped, murdered, burned, shot, and bayoneted by besieged Japanese troops. Whether early and concerted air operations against an entrenched enemy largely committed to self-destruction would have altered this outcome is debatable. These atrocities remain despicable, however, and the drawn-out battle left Manila an unrecognizable ruin of rubble and rotting corpses. “This was not Manila,” Paul Rogers recalled. “It was simply hell.”⁴

MacArthur visited the front lines of this urban battlefield just as he had throughout the advance from Lingayen. By February 23, the area around the Manila Hotel was secure enough for MacArthur to return to what for six years had been his residence. Following heavily armed troops up the ruins of the stairway leading to the penthouse, he arrived at its doorway with a dark sense of foreboding. The vase presented to Arthur MacArthur by the Japanese emperor in 1905 that Jean MacArthur had so carefully left in the entryway lay smashed on the floor next to the remains of a dead Japanese colonel. Whatever of MacArthur’s prized military library had not been looted lay in ashes. His and Jean’s personal possessions were missing or in ruins. The visit, MacArthur recalled, left him “tasting to the last acid dregs the bitterness of a devastated and beloved home.”⁵

Two weeks later, MacArthur made another poignant return—this time to Corregidor. Given MacArthur’s earlier embrace of island-hopping and his repeated protestations that his methods of assault routinely resulted in fewer casualties, one may wonder what the rush was. Corregidor nominally blocked the entrance to Manila Bay, but repeated air attacks against ships and dock facilities in the harbor had left the port almost unusable. The island itself had been under heavy air and naval bombardment since January 22, and its garrison might well have withered on the vine along with others. Corregidor’s capture, however, was to be far more symbolic than strategic.

On February 16, MacArthur ordered the 503rd Parachute Regimental Combat Team, the same unit that had made the daring jump into Nadzab, in New Guinea, in 1943—to make a risky drop onto the narrow confines of Corregidor’s Topside area while a reinforced battalion of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division came ashore near the South Dock. Willoughby’s G-2 estimated that there were only nine hundred Japanese defenders on the island to oppose these two thousand paratroopers and another thousand of infantry, but the defenders actually numbered more than 5,200 troops. The 503rd suffered 280 casualties related to the jump—most attributable to causes other than enemy fire. The infantry came ashore to light resistance as most of the defenders took to Corregidor’s labyrinthine network of tunnels and caves.6

That same day, MacArthur left his field headquarters at Hacienda Luisita and toured the front lines on Bataan. Driving in a jeep with only a small entourage, which included Egeberg, Lehrbas, and a handful of correspondents and armed infantrymen, MacArthur pushed along the eastern coast. This had been the route both of Wainwright’s retreat and the subsequent death march, in the opposite direction. Once again, much to the consternation of Egeberg and Lehrbas, MacArthur insisted on proceeding well beyond any semblance of fixed lines, at one point coming upon a hastily abandoned Japanese camp that still had hot rice in the cooking pot.

Part of the reason for the excursion was MacArthur theater at its best—the pensive conqueror in cap and sunglasses pressing forward at the head of his troops. Even from his critics’ perspective, there could be no doubt that Dugout Doug was dead. But for all his rigid pomp and choreographed actions, Douglas MacArthur was an intensely emotional private person. He had carried the burden of the defeat on Bataan—however he chose to characterize his own role in it—for three long years. Any responsibility he felt would never be washed away, but he needed to exorcise part of the guilt. Three times that day he confided to Egeberg, “You don’t know what a leaden load this lifts from my heart.”⁷

Back on Corregidor, the Japanese lost more than 1,500 men in three days of wild banzai charges. Then, on the night of February 21–22, as American infantry closed in around the Malinta Hill complex, an estimated two thousand Japanese committed mass suicide by igniting explosives that literally rocked the island. Nasty tunnel fighting lasted another week before the 503rd’s commander, Colonel George M. Jones, reported the island secure on March 1.

The next day, MacArthur embarked the surviving members of his Bataan Gang on a symbolic flotilla of four PT boats and headed for Corregidor. From Topside to the depths of the Malinta Tunnel, MacArthur inspected the ruins where he had endured so much uncertainty, then drew himself up in front of the bent and battered flagpole. Echoing words he had cabled to the aging John J. Pershing a month earlier, MacArthur instructed Jones to “have your troops hoist the colors to its peak, and let no enemy ever haul them down.”

Then he paid tribute to the defenders of Bataan and Corregidor and continued to exorcise the ghosts of his past. History would remember, he said, what had happened there “as one of the decisive battles of the world.” Had Corregidor not held out, he continued, “Australia would have fallen, with incalculably disastrous results.” Given Japanese war plans, the latter was almost certainly not true; however, decisive or not, Bataan and Corregidor would be forever etched in the American memory of World War II.8

The images of MacArthur at the front—from the Leyte landings until his return to Corregidor—also permanently etched the name of Douglas MacArthur onto that collective memory. His self-inflated aura had been a welcome and needed crutch in the dark days of 1942, and now, in the light of victory, the American public embraced him even more tightly. The weekly political report from the British embassy in Washington to London offered an outsider’s appraisal of the Americans’ reaction:

“MacArthur’s ‘I have returned,’ his new cry of ‘on to Tokyo’… and the satisfying reversal of Japanese and American roles in the Philippines… have touched off in the press one of the greater emotional outpourings of the Japanese war. Unstinted praise is being lavished upon MacArthur as a ‘master strategist’ and his champions, especially the Hearst-Patterson-McCormick press, have already renewed their campaign for MacArthur as supreme commander of all Allied forces in the Far East.”⁹ That battle concerning command had been raging since the beginning of the war, and it was about to come to a head.

What role was Douglas MacArthur to play in the Pacific thenceforth? It was a question with which Franklin Roosevelt and George Marshall had long grappled. MacArthur had repeatedly urged his appointment to a unified command of all Allied forces and the primacy of his SWPA line of advance. Roosevelt and Marshall had saved MacArthur from almost certain death in the Philippines and had earnestly provided him with far more men and equipment than MacArthur gave them credit for, even as they juggled the political realities of interservice rivalries and global commitments.

When faced with a decision to designate either Nimitz’s Central Pacific Area or MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area as the primary locus of the thrust against Japan, the Joint Chiefs had regularly delayed a decision, never categorically subordinating one theater to the other. The result was that the two lines of advance had finally met near the Philippines. With the Formosa option largely off the table, a single line of attack led northward from Luzon and the Marianas against the Japanese homeland. The line from the Central Pacific Area was clearly shorter.

In December of 1944, in between Leyte and Lingayen, MacArthur had made another run at Marshall on the issue. That time, however, he seems to have realized that butting heads with Ernie King and the US Navy remained pointless. He no longer recommended a unified command in the Pacific. In a change of direction, MacArthur told Marshall on December 17 that he was “of the firm opinion that the naval forces should serve under naval command and that the army should serve under army command. Neither service willingly fights on a major scale under the command of the other.”10

That sentiment had been proved generally untrue throughout the Pacific, but what led MacArthur to his change of heart was that he looked ahead to the invasion of Japan itself, saw it as principally land-based, and was determined to be at its head. Were he to remain only CINCSWPA, the 1942 dividing line between the Southwest Pacific Area and Nimitz’s Pacific Ocean Area would leave him with nothing to do north of Luzon. What MacArthur wanted was supreme command of all army and air force units throughout the Pacific.

When Marshall assured MacArthur that army planners were working on just such a revision to the 1942 Pacific command structure, MacArthur characteristically doubled down and pushed his point. “My anxiety over the completely faulty organization which now exists increases daily,” he told Marshall, “and it is my confirmed belief, based upon recent battle experience, that if it is not repeat not promptly remedied the United States will face one of the greatest military disasters in its history.”11

MacArthur was more emphatic in a draft of this communication that was never sent. He had considered saying: “It is evident that the emasculation of this command [SWPA] is contemplated despite the fact that it is commanded by the senior and most experienced U.S. Army commander in the Pacific, who has a highly integrated, competent and veteran staff, and under whom there has been an unbroken series of successful operations of the most complicated type ever undertaken.” Without naming Nimitz or giving credit to any of the senior army commanders who had served under him in the Marianas, MacArthur asserted, “These great land forces are to be commanded by an Admiral who cannot possibly have the professional background, tactical or logistical, to accomplish such an Army mission.”¹²

When the more tactful version was sent instead, MacArthur nonetheless called the command structure “the gravest issue in the Pacific that the country now faces” and strongly recommended that “if necessary the whole issue be placed before the President so that the responsibility for what may happen may not repeat not rest upon the army.”¹³

When Secretary of war Stimson questioned Marshall on MacArthur’s desire for unified army command in the Pacific, Marshall replied that MacArthur was correct in principle but “failed to recognize the limitations and exceptions” to those principles, including the fact that it would take some time to transfer the chain of command of army units under Nimitz to MacArthur, particularly those forces slated to invade Okinawa. According to Stimson, Marshall then “said what we both knew, that MacArthur is so prone to exaggerate and so influenced by his own desires that it is difficult to trust his judgment on such a matter.”¹⁴

During early 1945, Marshall also faced two external issues when it came to the Pacific command structure and resulting deployments. First, the anticipated transfer of troops from the European theater to the Pacific had been delayed by Germany’s unexpected surge in the Battle of the Bulge. Second, the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific war and the ways that might affect Pacific strategy and manpower requirements against Japan’s home islands was likely to be a topic at the upcoming Allied summit at Yalta.

Consequently, Marshall did not push the Joint Chiefs to address the change in command structure in the Pacific until February 26—after the Yalta Conference had revealed little that was new about Russia’s intentions against Japan. Six weeks of back-and-forth between army and navy planners followed. Differences of opinion included Admiral King’s continuing interest in operations against the coast of China north of Formosa and a Nimitz proposal to make Japan’s home islands a separate theater of operations.15

President Roosevelt, whose health was rapidly failing after Yalta, does not seem to have been directly involved in these discussions, despite MacArthur’s suggestion, but Admiral Leahy, who by then, with Roosevelt’s encouragement, had assumed supervision of all White House matters, discussed the command structure with secretary of the navy James Forrestal at length. Forrestal had just returned from an extended Pacific trip that included an offshore tour of the fighting on Iwo Jima as well as conferences with Nimitz on Guam and MacArthur in Manila.

MacArthur had expressed the opinion to Forrestal that any help from China “would be negligible”—by then this was widely accepted—but he urged securing a Russian commitment to attack Manchuria and pin down the large numbers of Japanese troops there, preventing them from redeploying to defend the home islands. MacArthur insisted that this Russian pressure had to occur before any American attack on the main islands.

Leahy, who had written MacArthur a “Dear Doug” letter of congratulations for his “splendid progress through the rain and the mud” of Leyte and remained among MacArthur’s biggest supporters, asked Forrestal his view of MacArthur.

“I told him,” Forrestal recorded in his diary, “that I thought MacArthur had a high degree of professional ability, mortgaged, however, to his sensitivity and vanity. I said I thought if it were possible for him [MacArthur] to have a conversation with Nimitz in the same manner in which Admiral Leahy and I were now talking, these two men could evolve the framework for command on the basis of… the Navy to run the fleet, the Army to conduct the operations when land masses are reached.” Forrestal declined to make a recommendation, but Leahy took from this conversation that the navy could be persuaded to accept the army position advocated by Marshall, his planners, and MacArthur.16

Finally, on April 3, two days after army troops and marines went ashore on Okinawa, the Joint Chiefs adopted the basic army proposal. MacArthur had gotten what he asked for and would be designated commander in chief of the US Army forces in the Pacific (CINCAFPAC) and would command all army and most air force units there. (The eight hundred B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force pounding Japan from the Marianas remained a sometimes nebulous third partner, responsible directly to Hap Arnold and the Joint Chiefs.) Nimitz retained his CINCPAC and CINCPOA titles and would command all naval units in the Pacific, including Kinkaid’s Seventh Fleet.

MacArthur was charged with responsibility for all land campaigns, while Nimitz was responsible for all fleet and amphibious operations. This directive effectively abolished the operational areas into which the Pacific had been carved in 1942, but it was not immediately as sweeping as it appeared. To secure Admiral King’s approval, the chiefs agreed that this change would not disrupt Nimitz’s current operations against Okinawa and that Nimitz and MacArthur would continue to command all forces of the other services in their respective theaters until they were transferred to the other command either by mutual agreement or JCS directive.

A JCS operational directive issued that same day tasked Nimitz with completing the occupation of Okinawa, subduing remaining elements of the Japanese fleet, and opening a sea route through La Perouse Strait, between Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido and Sakhalin Island. The latter was partly to anticipate Russia’s entry into the war but mostly to prevent Japanese troops in Manchuria from reinforcing the home islands, as MacArthur feared. MacArthur’s orders were to “complete the occupation of Luzon and conduct such additional operations in the Philippines as required for the accomplishment of the over-all objective in the war against Japan” and to utilize Australian troops for the occupation of North Borneo. Pursuing both these objectives would not be without controversy.

MacArthur and Nimitz were also charged with supporting each other’s operations in the Philippines and the Ryukyu Islands, principally Okinawa, and with cooperating with one another in planning and preparing for the land and sea campaign against Japan’s home islands. That, too, would not prove to be as easy as Forrestal had hoped.17

MacArthur, however, was quite pleased. “My heartiest congratulations on your great success in reorganizing the Pacific Command,” he cabled Marshall from Manila on April 5. “To have accomplished as much as you did amicably is a masterly performance. This represents an outstanding contribution not only to the Army, but to the country.” Acknowledging that the public reception of “our solution for the Pacific has been gratifying,” Marshall replied that he hoped that “mischievous cogitations and suggestions are now a thing of the past.”¹⁸

Six days later, Franklin Roosevelt died.

Douglas MacArthur and Franklin Roosevelt had long cloaked their personal feelings for each other in gratuitous public pronouncements protecting their individual agendas and in gracious correspondence filled with dubious expressions of personal affection. And it is possible that after their final meeting, at Pearl Harbor in July of 1944, both men came away with some measure of new respect for the rigors the other had endured.

MacArthur had always wanted Roosevelt’s job, however, and—his public protestations to the contrary—he had been convinced that he could perform it better than Roosevelt. Roosevelt had frequently found MacArthur to be a thorn in his side, but he adroitly used him, as he did most people, in support of his broad political objectives. If Bonner Fellers, MacArthur’s onetime intelligence officer and military secretary, is to be believed, MacArthur let his mask of presidential cordiality slip upon learning of Roosevelt’s death.

Riding together from MacArthur’s headquarters to his residence in Manila, they talked of those who had passed on since the beginning of the war, but especially about Roosevelt. As MacArthur got out of the car, he turned toward Fellers and said: “Well, the old man has gone—a man who never told the truth if a lie would suffice!”19 If MacArthur truly made this comment, the irony is that many of his critics would have said the same of him.

Having been given command of all army forces in the Pacific, MacArthur sought to make the most of it. Hardly was the ink dry on the JCS orders of April 3—cautioning a slow transition without disrupting ongoing Okinawa operations—when Sutherland, still MacArthur’s chief of staff, despite having had his wings clipped, Chamberlin, and Kenney swept into Nimitz’s headquarters on Guam. It was not a friendly meeting.

In his usual grating manner, Sutherland pushed for a firm schedule detailing when army units under Nimitz’s command, including those on Okinawa, would pass to MacArthur. This rigid approach had not been the intent of the Joint Chiefs. Nimitz and his staff found Sutherland’s manner particularly galling because they were only two weeks into the Okinawa campaign, and it was proving tough and unpredictable. Transfers from the logistics chain of army service units that were interwoven with Nimitz’s operations throughout the central Pacific, especially on Guam and Saipan, were even more problematic.²⁰

Kenney tried to brush off the resulting impasse by noting in his account of the meetings that the “jurisdictional problems involved… were so complicated that the dates and methods of transferring them from the jurisdiction of one theater commander to the other could not be settled at that conference.”²¹ Nimitz was blunter in his report to King.

Sutherland’s mission to secure command for MacArthur was “consuming valuable time and delaying constructive planning” on operational matters, Nimitz told King. Nimitz stood firm about what he would and would not release to MacArthur and when. Most distressing, Nimitz told King, was that “very little useful discussion has taken place concerning invasion plans [for Japan] and preparations, and the SWPA party was apparently not prepared for such discussion.” Sutherland was nevertheless able to state categorically what Nimitz termed “an interesting sidelight,” namely, that “MacArthur will land in Kyushu about D+3, stay a short time and then return to Manila until time for the Honshu landing.”²²

With little accomplished, Sutherland and his party returned to Manila, while King took Nimitz’s concerns straight to George Marshall. Sometimes it is more informative to read the drafts of unsent messages than the final text of those sent. Witness the message to MacArthur prepared by Marshall’s War Department staff in response. “Disturbing information has reached me from Admiral King,” the draft began, that “would appear to indicate a complete lack of understanding on Sutherland’s part,” including Sutherland’s assertions that unity of command was unworkable and that after Okinawa “no Army troops would be allowed to serve under an Admiral.”

“It is very embarrassing for me to feel compelled to take up with you a question of the employment of your staff officer,” the draft continued, “but I seriously doubt the advisability of utilizing Sutherland in further negotiations with the Navy.” Then came a broadside that King might well have delivered: “Our experience with Sutherland here in the War Department and certainly the Navy experience with him has been that, whatever his natural ability in many ways, he appears to be totally lacking in the faculty of dealing with others in negotiations on difficult matters.”

The draft ended by noting, “After long and trying negotiations covering months we have reached a basis for resolving the command situation in the Pacific so as gradually to arrive at a solution which would be not only workable but acceptable to both War and Navy Departments.” That said, further negotiations on that solution “would present extraordinary difficulties if conducted for you by Sutherland.”23

The letter that Marshall chose to send instead may say more about Marshall’s command style in dealing with MacArthur than the suggested draft reveals about the War Department’s bitter feelings toward the general’s chief of staff. “After considering the messages concerning the progress being made in the reorganization in the Pacific,” Marshall began, “I believe that you personally should meet with Admiral Nimitz in the near future in a personal effort to resolve between yourselves the problems which have arisen rather than depending upon your respective staff officers.”

Hinting that it was important to resolve these matters prior to the Joint Chiefs issuing orders to MacArthur to execute landings on Kyushu, Marshall deftly played to MacArthur’s ego and concluded: “I feel certain that you personally can handle the situation and avoid a breach that might well have tragic consequences.” No specific mention was made of Sutherland.24

The result was that, as he had done two years previously with Halsey and, before that, with Nimitz, MacArthur once again rolled out the red carpet. It was impossible, he said, for him to leave his headquarters in Manila, but he bade Nimitz a cordial welcome there. Ever the salt of the earth, Nimitz flew to Manila on May 16 and worked out the details of the Joint Chiefs’ April 3 charge directly with MacArthur. Sutherland’s brash talk of no army troops serving under an admiral was brushed aside. Most significant, the procedure that had long been employed in SWPA campaigns—that an admiral would command the amphibious phase until such time as a general established suitable headquarters ashore—was confirmed. Other points of agreement included marine air and ground units operating under army control when they were part of landing forces or when they were acting in close concert.²⁵

These agreements between MacArthur and Nimitz were positive, but they didn’t end all rivalries or jockeying for position. When Marshall suggested to MacArthur a few weeks later that King was strongly in favor of MacArthur’s being at Nimitz’s headquarters on Guam during the naval buildup for the Kyushu landings to foster coordination, MacArthur was emphatic in his reply. “This suggestion is impracticable of accomplishment,” he wrote Marshall. “Please tell Admiral King,” MacArthur went on, “that I disagree totally with his concept and that a long campaign experience has convinced me that if there is any one feature of a field commander that must be left to his sole judgment it is the location of his command post and the actual disposition of his own person.”²⁶

This was MacArthur’s rationale for his whereabouts over the course of the war. One moment he was seemingly intractably anchored to his headquarters—whether in Brisbane, Tacloban, or Manila—and the next he was off on wide-ranging frontline visits, frequently out of communication with his superiors and subordinates, to locations such as Los Negros, Morotai, and Leyte. In this instance, there was simply no way that MacArthur was going to allow himself to be headquartered, however briefly, in Nimitz’s domain. It was a question of ego, not a question of his ability to leave Manila. Even as he penned these lines to Marshall, MacArthur had just returned from a conqueror’s tour of the southern Philippines and northern Borneo, and ten days later he would not hesitate to embark on more of the same.

MacArthur’s orders from the Joint Chiefs announcing his role in the invasion of the Japanese home islands left much room for discretion regarding the remainder of the Philippines. They instructed him to complete the occupation of Luzon and conduct “such additional operations in the Philippines as required for the accomplishment of the over-all objective in the war.” Strictly speaking, “such additional operations” were to be undertaken only if they were essential to Japan’s defeat.27 But when issued, this directive was already well behind MacArthur’s activities in the field.

Given that he was so concerned about having command of the push northward to Japan, as well as his increasingly acclaimed tactic of island-hopping past strongholds, MacArthur nonetheless sent Eichelberger’s Eighth Army south from Luzon, even as Manila was barely secure, to attack isolated garrisons throughout the southern half of the archipelago. These targets were of dubious strategic value to “the over-all objective in the war,” and instead the Eighth Army might well have supported Krueger’s Sixth Army against Yamashita’s Shobu and Shimbu Groups, which were putting up strong resistance in northern Luzon and, arguably, still posed a threat to Manila.

Nonetheless, Eighth Army operations south of Luzon included landings at Puerto Princesa, on Palawan, on February 28; Zamboanga, in western Mindanao, on March 10; Iloilo, on Panay, on March 18; Cebu on March 27; Tawi Tawi and Jolo, in the Sulu Archipelago, on April 2 and 9 respectively; and Cagayan, in central Mindanao, on May 10. These pretty well covered the entire Philippines.

To be sure, MacArthur had multiple genuine reasons for conducting these operations, including the urgent need to liberate POW camps and rescue the general populace from last-ditch Japanese reprisals, but when MacArthur had said, “I shall return,” the man who in the fall of 1941 had convinced the War Department that he could defend the entire archipelago meant that he would return and free every last island. Quite simply, he wanted to be seen as the liberator of all the Philippines.