The immense ocean that formed the core of the Pacific theater extends over sixty-four million square miles, one-third of the earth’s surface. With its archipelagos, atolls, beaches, gulfs, volcanos, and capes, it stretches from the Arctic Circle to Antarctica, from the cordillera-edged Americas to the teeming mainland of East Asia. Its waters lave a multitude of nations and dependencies, many with ill-defined, overlapping boundaries. It was the spacious domain where the war started, and for many Americans it remained the more valid battleground. From the outset the war in the Pacific deeply engaged George Marshall, but unlike his performance in the Atlantic theaters, where his voice was commanding, his role in the Pacific was often hesitant and constrained.
Several factors explain this unsure grip. First, there was the navy. The Pacific was the navy’s realm, and Ernest King was its monarch.
Interservice struggle for predominance in a given theater was, perhaps, inevitable. King and the admirals accepted the army’s priority in the Atlantic arena. No doubt the navy had a significant role to play in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Indeed, the defeat of the German U-boat campaign against Allied Atlantic shipping, to which the U.S. Navy contributed, was the sine qua non of victory in Europe. But the maritime Battle of the Atlantic had to be shared with the British, with the Royal Navy in ultimate charge. King was almost resentful of the Atlantic. He was slow to see the vital need for Atlantic convoys to check the Axis subs, and besides he despised the British, whose turf the narrower ocean was. Having “fought under the goddam British in the First World War,” he was reputed to have proclaimed, “if I can help it, no ship of mine will fight under ’em again.”1 The Pacific was the place where the U.S. Navy could truly shine in the war against the Axis.
The army of course could not be denied an important role in the Pacific. The navy had a carrier-based air force and a military arm of its own—the marine corps—trained primarily for amphibious operations, but there were never enough marines or enough navy Wildcats and Corsairs to meet its offensive needs. Though frequently reluctant to do so, the admirals often had to turn to the army and its air arm for support. And then there was MacArthur’s command in Australia: With powerful urges to run the Pacific war by himself, the general had his own quasi-autonomous military force and his own small fleet. Finally, since Marshall was a leading voice on the Joint Chiefs, his approval for allotment of overall U.S. resources of men and matériel among the Allied theaters was generally vital for any important strategic decision. This role gave him a voice in the navy’s affairs—but not necessarily when it came to MacArthur. The chief of staff could not always successfully challenge his nominal subordinate, who exceeded him in fame, popularity, and thespian flair.
Leaving China aside, the Pacific war presented two major puzzles to the Joint Chiefs’ planners in Washington: What proportion of Allied fighting men and matériel resources should be allotted to it compared with Europe and the Mediterranean? And who should run the show? And, as part of this second point, how—or whether—to apply the unified-command principle so basic to Marshall’s vision of Allied grand strategy?
For months after Pearl Harbor the American public’s anxious attention was riveted on the bitter land, air, and sea engagements to stop the Japanese juggernaut. But to the planners and strategists at the Pentagon, including Marshall, many of the key Pacific issues were jurisdictional. After the collapse of the ABDA under General Wavell, the question of a supreme commander for the whole Pacific area became urgent. Admiral King supposedly favored such a unified command but stipulated that its head must be a naval officer. Marshall of course favored unity in principle but failed to fight for it successfully. Intent on assigning authority to the newly rescued MacArthur, he initially proposed a separate supreme command only for Australia, where MacArthur was now headquartered. In early 1942 the Joint Chiefs hammered out a compromise, but one that violated the principle that Marshall himself had so earnestly defended just weeks before. The vast Pacific theater would be divided into two major divisions: the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA), with MacArthur as supreme commander in Melbourne (later relocated farther north in Brisbane), and the Pacific Ocean Areas (POA), with Admiral Nimitz as commander in chief, headquartered at Honolulu. For the purpose of combat leadership, the second of these was to be further divided into three geographic subdivisions: South, Central, and North Pacific, the first under Vice Adm. Robert Ghormley and the other two under Adm. William “Bull” Halsey. And the unity principle was violated in still another way: Admiral Nimitz was to retain ultimate control of the modest contingent of second-class naval ships allocated to MacArthur (Seventh Fleet) under Adm. Thomas Kincaid, an authority that would trigger a fusillade of protests from Melbourne and embroil Marshall in incessant struggles to settle interservice disputes. Finally, in the overall war against Japan, there was the British-headed South East Asia Command (SEAC), established in August 1943, encompassing India, Burma, Ceylon, Malaya, and Sumatra, a theater that encroached on China, which Americans, if not Britons, deemed a vital partner in the anti-Axis war.
This arrangement would not resolve the issue of Pacific jurisdictions. There would be constant bickering over service boundaries, particularly those between MacArthur and the navy. The divided authority would also fail in the late phase of the Pacific war to establish clear priority in the final drive to subdue Japan, and at least once, in the waters off the Philippines, produce near disaster. But for the moment it was the best that was achievable.
But besides the interservice disputes over who should run the Pacific war, it was inevitable that Pacific combatants—soldiers as well as sailors—would resent the uneven division of military resources between themselves and the Europe–North Africa theaters. It is true that the navy’s own 1940 Plan Dog had proposed a Europe First strategy for the United States in the event of war with the aggressors. But Admiral King would ceaselessly protest the resource disparity between East and West. The Pacific fleet, he insisted time and again, had been consigned meager rations of 15 percent of the manpower and war tools allotted to Europe and North Africa, too little to effectively fight its assigned enemy. Redirecting an additional 5 percent to the Pacific would not harm the Europe First strategy but would enormously accelerate the war against Japan.
Viewed as a whole, the charge of geographic discrimination of military resources was not valid. As one student of World War II military command has noted, almost half of all American servicemen who were sent overseas were dispatched to the Pacific. But of course many of these were sailors or marines. The army, however, did in fact favor the Atlantic. As the war raged in Europe and the Mediterranean, Marshall and Stimson—their occasional resort to bluff notwithstanding—successfully resisted investing more resources in the Pacific than the 15 percent King cited. Of Marshall’s ninety combat divisions, Stephen Taaffe observes, only some twenty-one served in the Pacific theaters, fifteen of them under MacArthur’s command.2 The long delay of the cross-Channel assault in Europe would provide an opportunity, seized on by both MacArthur and King, to expand operations against the Japanese. But the bias remained to the very end of the European phase of the war. One set of figures cited by the historian Samuel Eliot Morison—a reserve admiral—shows a roughly 3 to 2 split of troops and a 2 to 1 split in aircraft in favor of Europe over the Pacific at the end of 1943.3
In later years Marshall’s most zealous critics would accuse him of harboring malicious prejudice against the Pacific theater. He thought this unfair. Though he obviously put the “German war” first, he always tried for balance, he insisted. When Forrest Pogue remarked to him in 1956 that “a lot of people assumed that you just gave up on the Pacific,” he denied the charge emphatically. “My struggle was to see that the main show [Europe] went on,” but also “that the later show was not washed out.”4
In its quest for “more” the navy could usually count on MacArthur as an ally. Almost from the moment he arrived in Australia, fearing that his would be the “forgotten front,” MacArthur demanded more troops, more planes, more guns, and more of the other matériel he needed, first to stop the enemy’s advance southward toward Australia and then to drive his own forces north toward dai Nippon itself. Typically, in May 1942, when naval resources originally assigned to his command were abruptly switched to imperiled Midway Island to fend off Admiral Yamamoto’s massive attack, he cried havoc. If the losses were not made up by stripping other theaters, he warned Marshall, Australia might fall to the Japanese. And if that were to happen, “the United States itself will face . . . a crisis of such proportions as she never faced in the long years of her existence.”5 And the protests resumed even after the decisive Midway naval victory had proved the worth of the additional investment. In late August he once again warned that neglecting the Pacific risked disaster. The Europe First grand strategy must be abandoned, he cabled the War Department, to avoid military catastrophe in the Pacific. “I beg of you most earnestly,” he wrote to Marshall, “to have this momentous question reviewed by the President and the chiefs of staff lest it become too late.”6 Nor were the general’s complaints confined to official channels; they were broadcast to his wide and influential network of military and political allies and partisans. “Out here,” he wrote to his old friend Gen. George Van Horn Moseley, “I am busy doing what I can with what I have, but resources have never been made available to me for a real stroke. Innumerable openings present themselves which because of the weakness of my forces I cannot seize.”7
MacArthur shamelessly manipulated the press to serve his goals. In early August 1942 he apparently fed the American head of the INS news service in Australia the material for a long indictment of the Joint Chiefs for starving the Southwest Pacific theater of troops and munitions. The article was widely circulated in the United States and angered Marshall, who quickly shot off a message demanding that the general issue a denial of the assertions. But Marshall fudged the issue of discrimination. “The needs of the Southwest Pacific Theater,” he asserted, “are weighed against those of all other theaters and once determined they have equal priority with those of other theaters.” He went on to say that MacArthur was of course “aware of what has been done and what is being done to supply your theater to meet the needs of the strategy adopted.”8 The response at best was disingenuous. It failed to deny the priority to Europe; it assumed MacArthur accepted that choice, and of course he did not. Other field commanders would complain to Marshall of shortages and supposedly unfair discrimination, but none seemed to suffer so severe a case of “localitis” (to use Marshall’s term) as did the commander of the Southwest Pacific Area.
But if MacArthur and King agreed that the United States must pay more attention and provide more resources to the Pacific theater, that did not lessen the ferocious competition between them for control of operations within the theater itself.
In June 1942, following the crushing Japanese defeat at Midway, King proposed a navy-led offensive that, according to MacArthur, threatened the jurisdictional agreement between him and the navy arranged earlier in the year. Nimitz and his forces, according to this plan, would seize the Solomons and adjacent islands, with their eventual goal the occupation of eastern New Guinea and New Britain, the potential Japanese launch points for invading Australia. MacArthur’s role would be limited to supplying some land-based aircraft and a few ships from his small naval contingent. Suspecting weak support in the War Department, the general immediately cried foul. MacArthur was no friend of Marshall’s. Gen. Robert Eichelberger, one of his most respected subordinates, claimed that he once heard his chief declare, “George Catlett Marshall is the most overrated officer in the United States Army.”9 And Marshall guardedly reciprocated the negative feelings. But whatever his personal reservations about his former boss, the chief of staff in this case rushed to defend him. The navy plan, he wrote to King, was “neither a logical arrangement in accordance with the principles we have adopted for joint action,” nor was it “a practical method for directing the operation.” By agreement, he reminded King, MacArthur was “in command of the area concerned,” and, moreover, his staff had been reconnoitering the target area for months and was better informed of its characteristics than was the navy. “To my mind,” he concluded, “it would be most unfortunate to bring in another commander at this time to carry out the operation.”10 In response King reminded Marshall that when it came to Europe he had supported the unity principle in favor of an army supreme commander. In the case of the South Pacific, however, where “practically all the forces used in the first instance will be amphibious and naval in character,” the commander of the operation should be a naval officer.11
The Army-Navy Pacific rivalry was exacerbated by the personalities of the two principals. Neither King nor MacArthur was a timid soul. The tall, balding chief of naval operations was a hard-drinking, acerbic, aggressive, irascible man afflicted with a strong case of concupiscence, apparently not confined to his wife. Navy lore had it that he shaved daily with a blowtorch. His daughter called him “the most even-tempered man in the world. He is always in a rage.”12 MacArthur was equally prickly and contentious. Marshall managed to preserve a passable working relationship with King, but MacArthur and his staff could not. The SWPA commander did not despise all the navy’s leaders; he got along well enough with Admiral Halsey. The two argued, but MacArthur always retained his respect for him as “a real fighting admiral,” not one (like so many others, he believed) who sought above all to avoid risking his ships.13 But as for Halsey’s colleagues, especially Nimitz and King, Halsey’s chief, they were the enemy, almost as malign as the Japanese foes.
In the absence of a supreme commander, MacArthur’s personal defects, like King’s, fed the unfortunate Pacific interservice struggle. The general suffered from more than a touch of paranoia. At times in his career he believed himself the target of a conspiracy by men in high places to defeat and humiliate him. These fears tainted his relations with his colleagues in the army itself. The War Department, he was convinced, was run by members of the “Chaumont crowd,” the inner circle of AEF staffers around Pershing in 1918, including Marshall, who were not his friends. And he was not entirely mistaken. Many of the staff officers at Pershing’s Chaumont headquarters had resented MacArthur’s brash, daredevil, self-promoting behavior in France. And later, during the twenties, Pershing himself, while chief of staff, had treated MacArthur rather shabbily, owing, many believed, to the romantic entanglement of both men with the same woman, the heiress-playgirl Henrietta Louise Brooks, MacArthur’s first wife.
But besides the SWPA commander’s suspicious nature, there was his dismaying megalomania. Son of a revered Civil War hero and military governor of the Philippines, MacArthur saw himself as a man of destiny who could rescue the nation from evil and incompetent leaders. He had grand political ambitions—an affliction Marshall deplored in any military leader, including in his lifetime patron General Pershing—and had already begun his persistent campaign to gain the Republican presidential nomination. With such inflated self-regard and grandiose goals, MacArthur inevitably chafed at relegation to a secondary theater and found it intolerable as well to share ownership of that theater with the navy. The interservice feud was personified by the antagonism between the general and Adm. Chester Nimitz, the POA commander in chief. That conflict was “bitter,” Marshall later lamented, “the prejudice so great.”14
The chief of staff often took the side of his fellow general, but he blamed both antagonists for the frequent interservice clashes. Nimitz was essentially a reasonable man, he believed, though King, he agreed, was not. As for MacArthur, he concluded in long perspective, he was power hungry and ambitious. He “wanted to run things. . . . There were no concessions on his part whatsoever.”15 Yet there was an important qualifier: Marshall did not hold him solely responsible for the army’s share of the interservice contention in the Pacific. The disagreements were greatly aggravated, he believed, by MacArthur’s chief of staff, Gen. Richard Sutherland, a military bully and an unpopular man at Southwest Pacific headquarters, who, through the entire war, carried on a virtual vendetta against the navy.
Yet whatever his true feelings, Marshall tried to avoid an open breach with his Pacific subordinate. He was careful to praise MacArthur and induced the president to stroke his ego by frequent displays of personal gratitude for his military successes. After his escape from Bataan, it was Marshall who recommended that MacArthur be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, an award the general’s father had also received. At times Marshall also sought to muzzle MacArthur’s critics. At one meeting of the Joint Chiefs, when King had fiercely denounced MacArthur, Marshall squelched the admiral with the stinging rebuke: “I will not have any meetings carried on with this hatred.”16
Meanwhile, on the Pacific battle lines, though starved for men and arms, MacArthur’s American and Australian forces in New Guinea checked and then gradually rolled back the early Japanese advances from the north toward Australia. Each gain, however, triggered another round of negotiations over control and resources among the divided Pacific commands and commanders.
By early 1943 the July agreement on Pacific jurisdictions seemed inadequate. In February both MacArthur’s joint Australian-American campaign against the Japanese in Papua, in south-central New Guinea, and the navy–marine corps invasion of Guadalcanal in the Solomons, had been victoriously concluded, but both operations had uncovered confusion in command and poor coordination between the services. Now, with further advances against the enemy in prospect, Marshall and King both believed that clarification of Pacific authority was essential. In February the chief of staff convened a conference in Washington for mid-March, which would bring together senior representatives of the army, air force, and navy to consider future Pacific moves, assign resources to the different services, and sort out the lines of authority over future operations. The deficiencies of disunity would be repaired.
The meetings were attended by most of the senior staff officers in the Pacific, with Marshall and King initially stepping off to the side ready to intervene only if necessary. Making the case for the navy was Charles Cooke; for the army, Wedemeyer of Victory Program fame. MacArthur remained in Brisbane; Sutherland would be his voice at the meeting. The immediate issue at hand was MacArthur’s Elkton II Plan, aimed at the capture of Rabaul in the Bismarck Archipelago off northeast New Guinea, a goal set by the Joint Chiefs.* The seizure of the heavily manned and fortified enemy stronghold, the chiefs stipulated, must be accomplished with the modest allotment of troops and equipment imposed by existing shortages of shipping and other resources. Back in Brisbane, MacArthur had bridled at the assignment when first proposed. To conduct the Southwest commander’s part of the offensive successfully, Sutherland protested, would require more than twenty-two divisions and forty-five air groups, not the niggardly allocation the chiefs had proposed. The navy, too, had its disagreements with MacArthur, but not over resources, and now, at the conference, its spokesmen made it clear that they too wanted more of everything for the Pacific. Admiral Cooke, described by some army planners as even “meaner than King,” aggressively presented the navy’s case. He had attended the Casablanca Conference as part of the navy’s contingent and now denied vehemently that the Allies there had rejected the need for vigorous operations in the Pacific. The planners at Casablanca, he claimed, had only agreed “to employing the maximum means against Germany which will not jeopardize our position in the Pacific.”17 He especially questioned whether the European theater had not received more airpower than needed at the expense of the Pacific.
The interservice debate quickly became heated, with the Army Air Forces overall, though making its own demands for reinforcement, supporting the Europe First line. Though Marshall and the army yielded minimally on the added-resources issue, chipping in a few additional air groups for the Rabaul assault, in exchange they reduced the number of ground troops assigned to the Pacific theater. With help from Admiral Leahy, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the army also squeezed from the navy an agreement that MacArthur would be placed in charge of all operations in his assigned Pacific sector, including some conducted by naval task forces.
The conference did not solve the problems that had inspired it. It failed to change, except marginally, the existing percentage allocation of resources from Europe to the Pacific. As for the conflict over service jurisdictions, it had been solved for only one operation. Marshall’s surviving hope to address the larger problem of divided Pacific command had been ignored and would bedevil army-navy relations to the war’s end. All told, according to Maurice Matloff, “the military planning growing out of the . . . Conference was essentially short range and limited in scope.”18
The inconclusive nature of the outcome perhaps owed something to Marshall’s inattention. He had been briefed on the early conference meetings by Wedemeyer, but soon after, nursing a persistent cold, he had gone off with Katherine to Miami Beach for ten days of relaxation. If he expected to enjoy the sea and sand anonymously he was disappointed. At one point, in a local shoe store with Katherine to buy beach sandals, he was recognized by the manager, who, in a loud voice, announced his presence. As Pogue notes, to the general’s dismay, the “quiet crowd of shoppers turned into a noisy welcoming committee.”19 Marshall returned to Washington on March 14, but in his absence the interservice divisions had hardened, making the disappointing achievements of the Washington meetings perhaps inevitable.
In the months that followed, the differences between MacArthur and the navy over Pacific strategy sharpened. A year and a half after the Pearl Harbor disaster, the navy’s confidence and esprit had returned; moreover, by midsummer of 1943 dozens of new aircraft carriers, battleships, and landing craft were sliding off American construction ways. The navy’s wartime expansion would be phenomenal. Unlike its sister service, the navy encountered few obstacles to growth from citizens and politicians. By mid-1944, Max Hastings notes, “warships were coming off the slips faster than crews could be mustered and trained to man them.”20
Revived confidence and augmented firepower now stirred navy planners to demand a major realignment of U.S. Pacific strategy against Japan. Rather than MacArthur’s plan to roll up the Japanese conquests from the south by advancing from his Australian base, retaking the Philippines, and then moving against the enemy’s home islands, priority would be given to a navy-led thrust through the central Pacific against the fortified islands mandated to Japan by the League of Nations, bypassing the Philippines. A Central Pacific strategy, then, would become the major thrust against Japan. The navy’s new resolve was heralded in February when King proposed an attack against the Gilberts, followed in early June by an assault to seize the Marshall Islands farther north. At the Quadrant Allied summit conference in mid-August in Quebec, the Combined Chiefs would officially sanction the navy’s new strategy, though avoiding the issue of the Philippines, whose ultimate fate did not yet seem urgent.
The new Central Pacific initiative obviously put MacArthur and the navy on a collision course once more. For MacArthur, bypassing the Philippines was inconceivable. Strategically, he observed, they lay athwart the most direct route to Japan. Their successful reconquest, moreover, would force the Japanese to rely on limited-range carrier planes while exposing them to more effective Allied land-based aircraft. But for MacArthur retaking the Philippines was more than a strategic issue. The commander of SWPA had promises to keep. After his escape from Bataan to Australia he had solemnly pledged he would “return.” This was a matter of sacred honor, he insisted: He could not betray the Filipinos suffering under the brutal yoke of the Japanese enemy. But beneath the surface assuredly there also lay guilt. MacArthur, more than a few observers believed, had saved his own neck by abandoning the Filipinos to their grim fate when he fled to Australia. He and his partisans of course denied the charge, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that long after the escape he remained uneasy about his own motives and sought to appease them by his commitment to return.
And on the issue of the route to Japan, MacArthur had reason to worry about his superior’s support. Marshall was indecisive. Early in the debate, as in the past, he resisted the navy’s attempt to subordinate MacArthur’s authority to theirs. Yet he and the army planners finally proved surprisingly accommodating to the navy. Much to King’s delight, the new navy Central Pacific strategy was endorsed by the Joint Strategic Survey Committee, a panel of the Joint Chiefs headed by Marshall’s Anglophobic friend Stanley Embick. For the navy the new track, the Central Pacific offensive, not only seemed the fastest and least costly road to the enemy’s homeland, but it might also compel the Japanese navy to accept battle with the now-superior American Pacific Fleet—which would quickly decide the Pacific war.
But despite yielding to the navy’s new strategy, Marshall did not totally abandon MacArthur. At the Quadrant Conference in August 1943 he would argue that both axes of attack in the Pacific must be pursued, even if it meant some duplication of effort. In effect he had once again failed to take a focused position. There is no reason to assume that Marshall’s response was based purely on strategic considerations. Whatever its military virtues, the two-pronged strategy also met an important political need. Today historians generally judge deficient MacArthur’s defense of the Philippines after Pearl Harbor, but the contemporary media had made the bitter struggle at Bataan and Corregidor into an intrepid epic and MacArthur into a national hero. (As late as 1945 Americans would place him first in a poll of the country’s greatest generals.) Now, as the military and naval chieftains debated the future course of the Pacific war, the sovereign American voters demanded that he not be sidelined into a mere supporting role. Whatever Marshall himself actually felt about the general and his plans, it was probably decisive that FDR and his political advisers simply could not ignore the public’s yearning for a military savior.
Marshall and MacArthur met face-to-face only once during the war. The meeting was a spinoff from another Allied summit that included meetings with Russia’s Stalin and China’s Chiang Kai-shek. From late November through early December 1943, the chief of staff attended two meetings in Cairo code-named Sextant, the first devoted largely to Far Eastern matters, the second to tying up the loose ends of the first. Sandwiched between the two would be Eureka, a more consequential meeting in Tehran with the Soviet leader to consider further operations against the European Axis enemies. Following the second Cairo meeting, after sightseeing visits to Luxor and Karnak to inspect ancient Egyptian monuments, Marshall decided to fly home by way of the Far East and the Pacific. Twice before he had considered visits to MacArthur but had changed his mind. Now, he believed, the general needed some reassurance that he was still esteemed and he, his boss, must make the time for it.
Marshall traveled to the Pacific by C-54 army transport provided by General Sutherland. He had intended to visit his stepsons, Clifton and Allen, in the Mediterranean, where they were both serving as army officers, but canceled the side trips as inconvenient. On the way he stopped in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) briefly and then flew on to Port Moresby in New Guinea, MacArthur’s forward headquarters. He had hoped to meet the general at Moresby. But MacArthur rudely chose not to be present, and Marshall had to seek him out on nearby Goodenough Island.
When they did meet, their discussion, held in private, apparently was cordial. There is no official record of what the two men said; only MacArthur’s own self-serving account exists. Marshall did have reservations about MacArthur, and disapproved even more of his obsequious staff, which he labeled dismissively as MacArthur’s “court.”21 In any event, at lunch that day, according to MacArthur, Marshall was accommodating. But he was also apologetic. After reviewing the decisions regarding the Pacific and the Far East made at Cairo, he acknowledged that the Southwest Pacific was being shortchanged. But it was not his fault, he explained. He had defended the army’s role in the theater, but Admirals Leahy and King, both influential with the president, were responsible for the navy’s priority, and there was little he could do to rectify it. MacArthur depicted himself as taking the high road. For his own part, he told Marshall, he deplored the interservice rivalry in the Pacific. The army-navy competition must not be allowed to undermine the war effort against Japan, he piously declared.
Marshall left New Guinea on December 16 for Guadalcanal and then flew on to other Pacific sites where American fighting men were engaged or garrisoned. He inspected training camps, visited military hospitals, spoke to assemblies of troops, and observed combat rehearsals and reenactments. On December 19 he arrived in Honolulu, where he attended a demonstration in jungle-fighting techniques. At the end of the presentation he delivered a pep talk to the men who had performed, most of them scheduled to embark soon for the Pacific island fighting fronts. It was a curiously confused and ambiguous speech that lauded American military training while simultaneously acknowledging its deficiencies and, by implication, his own imperfect performance as a trainer. He began with a simplified explanation of the early successes of the Japanese army following Pearl Harbor: The enemy, he noted, had received jungle training while American soldiers had not. And yet, he reassured the soldiers, those advantages were limited. The “Japs” were “restricted and lack variation,” while “our great advantage is our enterprise and resourcefulness.” This remark undoubtedly played well to Americans’ self-image as an innovative, individualistic, democratic people. But Marshall could not ignore the reality as revealed by recent combat experiences in the Mediterranean. He immediately undermined the self-congratulation by praising the enterprise of the Wehrmacht as Americans were now confronting it in Italy, especially its focus on small-unit tactics. He concluded with an improbable summons to the soldiers to imitate the German enemy: “You men have to do the same and better, and you have the initiative and the leadership to do it.”22
Well into 1944 the rivalry between MacArthur and the navy over jurisdictions and directions continued, with Marshall seeking to smooth ruffled feathers. In March 1944, long after King had consolidated his Central Pacific strategy, the issue of theater boundaries again intruded. King wanted to add the harbor and airfield of Manus Island, just north of New Guinea, to Nimitz’s theater. MacArthur once again saw the move—which favored the navy’s preference for a more direct approach to Japan over his own cherished invasion of the Philippines—as an attempt to curtail his authority and derail his plans. In fact, the general was right. King doubted the Philippines were strategically important to winning the war against Japan. Formosa to the north, closer to the enemy’s home islands, was the better objective.
On February 27 the general sent Marshall a letter, hand-delivered in Washington by Sutherland, shrilly protesting once again the navy’s attempt to intrude into his Southwest Pacific command. The letter was full of MacArthurian bluster and half-hidden threats to invoke his popularity with the American public to intimidate his opponents. Not only was this a serious reflection on his capacity to lead, he wrote, it was psychologically demoralizing and would “cause a reaction not only in the soldiery but in public opinion that would be extremely serious.” He was particularly alarmed, he said, that the navy intended to prevent him from retaking the Philippines. His personal integrity and honor were at stake, he once more told his chief, and he must be allowed to present his case personally to Stimson and FDR before Marshall decided how to respond to the proposed change. The implication was clear: He would resign if the navy got its way.
Marshall yet again sought to soothe the general: “I am in agreement with the reasons you advance against such a proposal” as the navy’s. On the other hand he could not see that “a change in boundary of your area, in itself, could be regarded as a serious reflection upon your capacity to command.” Nor could he see that it implied that the navy intended to take from MacArthur’s leadership any campaign to invade the Philippines. Still, if MacArthur wished, he wrote, he would arrange for him to see Stimson and the president.23 In the end MacArthur abandoned the visit to Washington and settled the issue with the navy directly. In a meeting in Brisbane in early March he told the visiting Halsey that he was not going to be bulldozed by the navy. No navy ships would be allowed to use the facilities at Manus except those of Admiral Kincaid’s small Seventh Fleet squadron, attached to his own Southwest Pacific command. Halsey protested that the general was hampering the war effort, but to no avail: MacArthur got his way.
Nonetheless the issue of whether to bypass the Philippines to make Formosa, off the Chinese mainland, the launchpad for invading Japan itself remained very much alive. The option preferred by the navy appalled MacArthur on many grounds. His honor and his conscience were deeply involved. But in a mid-June protest to Marshall he made his case against the latest navy challenge on strategic and propagandistic grounds. “It is my most earnest conviction that the proposal to bypass the Philippines and launch an attack across the Pacific directly against Formosa is unsound,” he declared. The operation would have to dispense with vital land-based air support and would suffer devastating enemy air attacks on its flanks from the Philippines. “The hazards of failure would be unjustified when a conservative and certain line of action [the Philippines route] is open.” MacArthur also dismissed another non-Philippines proposal: launching an attack directly on Kyushu, the southernmost Japanese home island. It was, in his opinion, “utterly unsound.” Once more the invaders would be exposed to lethal air assault, and without adequate shipping to transport the troops to boot. But besides these military considerations MacArthur believed that avoiding the Philippines would seriously damage America’s reputation at home and abroad. “If the United States should deliberately bypass the Philippines, leaving our prisoners, nationals and loyal Filipinos in enemy hands without an effort to retrieve them at earliest moment we would incur the gravest psychological reaction.” Millions in Asia would lose respect for America. It would also, he warned, “cause extremely adverse reactions among the citizens of the United States.”24
Just returned from Britain and Italy, Marshall replied to his difficult subordinate a week later. His response was not favorable. While MacArthur’s position had not yet been discussed by the Joint Chiefs, he wrote, he would give the general his views “without delay.” Marshall sought to put the case in a larger frame. The information received from the secret decrypts of Magic indicated a steady buildup of Japanese strength in the Philippines and adjacent areas, he noted. “In other words further advances in this particular region will encounter greatly increased Japanese strength in most localities.” By contrast, “It would appear that the number of troops required for a successful operation against Formosa in early 1945 would not be required against the present garrison of Formosa.” But there was another consideration in favor of the Formosa option. The military picture in China had not been promising since the beginning of the new Japanese offensive. The Joint Chiefs now feared that the Chinese army would collapse and the country’s entire Pacific Coast fall into enemy hands. They believed that the United States might well need to occupy that coastal region as part of a successful final campaign against Japan, and the possession of Formosa would keep the Japanese from preventing that operation. Marshall made his endorsement of the Formosa tack credible by noting that an assault on or about November 1 would begin with six divisions, with three more to soon follow.25
The exchanges between MacArthur and his Pentagon bosses did not settle the issue of the Philippines versus Formosa. The subject would fester for weeks more before being finally resolved at the highest level.
China, the vital portion of the Pacific theater located on the East Asian mainland, was home to five hundred million people, many of them now suffering under an imperialism far crueler and more exploitive than previous Western versions. American planners could not ignore the Japanese conquests on the Asian mainland, and above all the fate of China. Marshall had no doubt of its importance. If nothing else, he had spent two and a half happy and prosperous years during the 1920s in Tientsin and believed he understood China’s strategic value. In this Pacific arena the chief of staff would be less an observer and mediator and more an active agent.
The American preoccupation with China long predated Pearl Harbor. For many years Christian denominations in the United States had labored to bring the message of Jesus and the Gospels to the “heathen Chinee.” Millions of American churchgoers had contributed their mites on Sundays to the missionary cause in East Asia, and in the process had come to sympathize with the Chinese people and even to admire Chinese culture, though in fact few understood the appalling inequality, poverty, and pervasive venality that marked its political and social institutions. The brutal Japanese attacks of the 1930s, triggering two prolonged Sino-Japanese wars—the true beginning of World War II—had further stirred American sympathies for the suffering Asian people. Roosevelt reinforced this concern for China by his strong belief—prophetic, though premature—that the vast East Asian nation was destined to become a world power that would vitally affect postwar events and have to be reckoned with in the years ahead.
But besides its cultural and future geopolitical imprint, China counted strategically. On mainland China the armies of the Nationalist (Kuomintang) leader Chiang Kai-shek in the center and the south, and of the Communist leader Mao Tse-tung at Yan’an in the north nailed down almost a million Japanese troops, soldiers who might otherwise be abetting Japan’s conquests or defending the Japanese home islands. It was no secret that the ill-trained, ill-led, underpaid, and underequipped Chinese armies, both Nationalist and Communist, though collaborating during the war to fight the common enemy, were incapable of defeating the Japanese and indeed seldom engaged them in full-scale battle. And it was also clear that Chiang’s regime was rife with greedy, corrupt officials who siphoned off millions of dollars of Allied aid to line their own pockets while the Communists, though winning the favor of the peasants, rejected the values of Western democracy. Yet unlike the skeptical British, for whom the Pacific war was a sideshow, American strategists could not afford to dismiss Chiang and Mao as irrelevant. At the outset at least, Marshall was one who believed that “keeping China in the war,” and if possible bolstering and reforming its military forces to make them effective, was a significant component of victory in the Pacific.
To American strategic planners, this conclusion in turn required that the vast country’s land connections with the outside world through the Burma Road, lost when the British abandoned Burma to the Japanese foe in 1942, be restored. Clearly, without easy access to the planes, guns, trucks, food, and ammunition needed by a modern army, China could not become an effective opponent of Japan. Chiang himself craved restored links with the outside world, though within the Nationalist leadership the military supplies from Britain and America more often served to strengthen the regime against its domestic, rather than its foreign, enemies. Marshall’s experience in Tientsin twenty years before had exposed him to the early struggles for Chinese unity. Now, after Pearl Harbor, when China had become a potentially important ally in the battle against Japan, the deep division between Chiang’s Kuomintang and Mao’s Communists threatened to nullify its value as a partner in war.
Marshall had his reservations about Chiang’s regime, but the true enigma was Mao and his communists. The stocky, moon-faced son of a prosperous peasant, as a young man Mao had supported the 1911 revolution under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen, which overthrew the Manchu Qing Dynasty and established the Chinese republic. In 1921 Mao became a charter member of the Chinese Communist Party, which, through the early twenties, remained allied with the Kuomintang founded by Sun. Finally refusing to share power with another authority, in 1927 Chiang drove the Communists from the Kuomintang. In response Mao established a virtually independent Communist state in Jiangxi Province in southeast China and was soon engaged in a guerrilla war with Chiang. In 1934–35 the Nationalists forced their rivals to abandon Jiangxi and, following the famous “Long March,” resettle in Yan’an, in Shensi Province, in the north-central region. There Mao and his followers reestablished their autonomous regime and instituted reforms favoring the peasants and creating an honest, though harshly authoritarian, administration that evoked wide admiration among visiting observers. In the late 1930s Mao and his associates joined the struggle against the Japanese invaders and, many observers believed, fought more effectively against the enemy than the corrupt and inefficient army of the Nationalist central government in Chungking. In later years Mao and his regime would be equated by many Westerners with the Soviets as part of an international Communist conspiracy, but in fact, at least at the outset, the Russians were skeptical of Mao and his followers. They were not, they believed, orthodox Marxists for they mistakenly identified the peasants, rather than the urban proletariat, as the true agents of revolution. And besides, they were potential rivals rather than submissive allies of the Soviet government in Moscow. In June 1944 Stalin himself revealed Soviet ambivalence about Mao and his followers. “The Chinese Communists are not real Communists,” he told American ambassador Averell Harriman. They were “‘margarine’ Communists. . . . Nevertheless,” he added, “they are real patriots and they want to fight Japan.”26
At Chiang’s request, after Pearl Harbor, FDR agreed to appoint a high-ranking American officer to serve as the Generalissimo’s military adviser. When consulted, Marshall, seconded by Stimson, recommended Gen. Joseph Stilwell. The general would serve simultaneously as Chiang’s chief of staff, as commander of the small contingent of China-based U.S. troops, as administrator of American Lend-Lease, and as commander of Chinese forces deployed in the British colony of Burma.
The choice was an easy one for Marshall. Stilwell and his wife, Winifred, were friends of his from Tientsin days, a friendship reinforced when Marshall brought Stilwell to Fort Benning in the late twenties to help reform the Army Infantry School. Since then Stilwell had visited China several times and spoke acceptable Mandarin. He was also a stubborn, caustic man who earned the sobriquet “Vinegar Joe” at Benning for his harsh tongue-lashing of incompetent students.
Soon after his arrival in Chungking, Stilwell detoured to Burma, China’s neighbor to the west. There he witnessed the post–Pearl Harbor British defeat by the Japanese and the hasty, fumbling withdrawal of British forces to India, the retreat that had severed the Burma Road. This inglorious debacle, and later experiences, made Stilwell a vocal Anglophobe who called the haughty British military leaders in SEAC’s India headquarters “monocled asses” and worse. Back in China he also developed a deep contempt for Chiang and his regime for its corruption, incompetence, and cowardice. In his most jaundiced view the Chiang-led Nationalists were “a gang of fascists” much like the Nazis but without their efficiency. His opinion of Chiang himself, reinforced by later events, was no better. Chiang was contemptible; the “peanut dictator,” or “the little dummy,” as he called him.27 Stilwell had a better opinion of Mao and his forces. The communists in Yan’an, he confided to his diary, “reduce taxes, rents, interest, . . . raise production, and standard of living, . . . practice what they preach.”28 Chiang and his circle soon came to reciprocate Stilwell’s disdain. The American commander, they concluded, was an arrogant, overbearing man, a sharp irritant who wielded too much power and expected the impossible of them.
If Vinegar Joe felt only contempt for Chiang and his regime, he respected the Generalissimo’s subjects, the Chinese people, and believed them capable of making effective soldiers if properly trained and supplied. To that end he organized in India a five-division elite corps of American-trained Chinese troops. These men would help the Allied campaign, planned at Casablanca, to retake Burma and restore China’s connection to the outside world. He also pushed hard for building a new road from northeastern India to restore a land supply route to China to supplement the risky, costly, and limited American-piloted cargo plane flights over the lofty Himalayan “Hump.” The Ledo Road, soon nicknamed “Stilwell’s Folly,” never carried the volume of equipment and supplies transported by the air route, precarious and wasteful though that was, and its construction cost the lives of eleven hundred American service troops, many of them African Americans. The goal of restoring the original Burma Road then remained an Allied objective.
The “China tangle” was further snarled by the presence of Claire Chennault, an aggressive, leather-faced, retired Army Air Corps officer who had arrived in China in 1937 to serve as Chiang’s aviation adviser in the developing struggle against the Japanese aggressors. In April 1941, well before Pearl Harbor, Chennault organized the Flying Tigers, a fighter plane group composed of American mercenary pilots based in Burma that received broad media attention in America, much of it exaggerated puffery, for its success in combat with the Japanese air force.
Chennault and Stilwell soon clashed over the most effective military strategy for the Nationalists to pursue against Japan. By 1941–42 Chiang’s forces and the Japanese invaders had reached a stalemate. Avoiding battle when- and wherever possible, the Generalissimo in effect no longer challenged the enemy’s occupation of a broad swath of coastal China. Stilwell believed that properly equipped and under his tutelage, Chinese troops were capable of mounting a major land offensive against the enemy that could drive them from the country. Chennault’s vision was drastically different. A passionate and uncritical advocate of airpower, he held that China’s contribution to the Far Eastern war would be primarily as a giant aerodrome for the Allies. American planes based in unoccupied China would attack Japanese-controlled Chinese cities and Japan’s vital maritime commerce; Japan itself would be pounded into submission. As he wrote to Hap Arnold, with five hundred planes to command he could “burn out the industrial heart of the [Japanese] Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant-heaps of Honshu and Kyushu,” the Japanese home islands.29 Secretary Stimson and his writing collaborator McGeorge Bundy would later describe Chennault’s view as, in essence: “American air power would defeat the Japanese.”30
Chiang much preferred Chennault’s strategy. Airpower was far cheaper than a large well-trained, well-paid army, and less disruptive of his preferred political and social arrangements for Chinese society. Stilwell’s plan would impose heavy costs in manpower and equipment that the lethargic and self-protective Chiang shunned. Besides, the Generalissimo preferred to husband his resources for an eventual showdown with Mao and his forces. And in any case, the high-handed and demanding American was personally resented, and any policy he favored was suspect.
Unfortunately Stilwell had a rare gift for making enemies even beyond Chiang and his circle. His harsh criticism and rancorous relations with the British military leaders in New Delhi would offend Lord Louis Mountbatten, Alexander’s successor as SEAC head. At one point Mountbatten demanded that Stilwell be removed from any role in Burma and confined exclusively to his China responsibilities.
Despite the general’s personal deficiencies Marshall and Stimson remained staunch Stilwell partisans. The chief of staff and the secretary of war shared the prickly general’s desire to reopen the sealed Burma land route for resupply and reequipment of the Chinese army. They also accepted his vision of a reformed Chinese army capable of carrying its weight against Japan. Marshall, moreover, considered the inefficient, and insufficient, air supply route from India over the Himalayas, favored by Chennault, an intolerable drain on overall Allied manpower and equipment. As he would tell an interviewer in 1956, the “extraordinarily heavy expense of planes to carry gasoline to Chiang’s air effort was a very costly matter to us in Italy.”31 At Casablanca, Marshall strongly endorsed Stillwell’s plan for a British-Chinese campaign to recapture Burma—though not, he cautioned, at the expense of Europe First. As for Chennault’s air campaign against Japan from mainland Chinese bases, it would, he believed, merely provoke a major, and probably successful, Japanese offensive against those bases. Responding to an earlier proposal to build up U.S. airpower to protect the Hump route, Marshall noted that “as soon as our air effort hurts the Japs, they will move in on us, not only in the air but also on the ground.”32
Yet Marshall was not indifferent to Stilwell’s personal failings. In March 1943, after a series of press articles describing his protégé’s disagreements with Mountbatten, he sharply rebuked him: “You do not appear to have made an effort to establish a smooth working-relationship with the British commander and his staff regardless whether or not you agree with [their] final decisions,” he wrote. Stilwell must “seek an immediate personal interview with Admiral Mountbatten” to see if he could “reach a working accord which is essential between two officials in the positions he and you occupy.”33 Stilwell complied and apologized for his offenses, but his resentment of the British and Chiang did not abate.
Unfortunately for Marshall and Stimson, at the outset Chennault had the backing of Roosevelt, who considered the airman’s plan a low-cost, low-risk experiment at worst. And with FDR’s support the air bases were established in unoccupied China. Looking ahead, in late 1943 Chennault’s pilots launched the first air raids against Japanese targets from Fourteenth Air Force bases in southern China. Other raids by the new giant B-29s soon followed. But Marshall was right: The president’s gamble quickly failed. The attacks triggered a major Japanese ground offensive (Operation Ichigo) that overran the bases and shut the raids down and then threatened the very survival of still-unoccupied China. B-29 attacks on Japan continued, but only after they were rebased on the Pacific islands of Saipan and Tinian following their seizure from the Japanese in the summer of 1944.
Meanwhile, the Stilwell-Chennault wrestling match raged on. In early September 1943 Chennault wrote to FDR complaining that he had not received promised supplies and implying that Stilwell was responsible. FDR passed the problem on to Marshall, and the chief of staff concluded that the blame lay with Chiang and his wife, the fetching American-educated Mai-ling Soong, who had become Chiang’s adviser and most effective advocate in the United States. Soon after, China’s foreign minister, Dr. T. V. Soong, Madame Chiang’s brother, on a visit to Washington, provoked the president by a set of ill-tempered demands that China’s status in the anti-Axis grand alliance be raised to equality with the Big Three and Stilwell’s power over China’s military affairs be reduced. An exasperated FDR asked Marshall to make the irascible diplomat see reason. Marshall talked soothingly to Soong but rejected any change in the command structure in the Far East. Finally, under persistent bombardment from Soong, in mid-October FDR lost patience with the whole China imbroglio and told Stimson that he had decided to fire Stilwell. Marshall’s own faith in his protégé had diminished when, the previous April and May, at several conferences in Washington, a weary Stilwell had made a poor showing defending himself and his policies to the Joint Chiefs. He had been tempted to dismiss Stilwell at that time but had reconsidered. Now, on October 19, at both the president’s and Chiang’s behest, he composed a telegram informing Stilwell “that in view of the attitude of the Generalissimo it will be necessary to replace you in your present position in the Far East.”34
Marshall brought this document to Stimson’s office for his final approval. However, just as the secretary was reading the message, Stilwell’s own cable arrived at the War Department, informing him that the Generalissimo had changed his mind. Apparently Madame Chiang and her sister Madame H. H. Kung had unexpectedly intervened on Vinegar Joe’s behalf. Though risking a family schism, the sisters had subverted their own brother’s wishes and saved Stilwell’s neck. After an interview with Chiang at which he contritely promised to avoid further challenges to the Generalissimo’s authority, Stilwell was restored to favor.
Despite this near-beheading, Stilwell’s standing with Marshall and the president reached its apogee in mid-1944, when the new Japanese Ichigo offensive, triggered by Chennault’s bombing campaign and met by feeble Nationalist resistance, seemed to threaten China’s very survival. In early July, Marshall approved a Joint Chiefs memo to FDR that praised Stillwell, took issue with Chennault’s reliance on the Hump supply route to support his air campaign, and recommended that the president prod Chiang to accept Stillwell as overall commander of all military forces in China. FDR agreed and sent the proposal to Chiang. To strengthen Stilwell’s hand, he simultaneously promoted him to the rank of full general. The Generalissimo’s response was negative. Chiang had no intention of letting a foreigner, and a hostile one at that, take over general command of all Chinese forces. He could not adopt the president’s proposal, he told Roosevelt. Chinese troops did not readily accept direction from any authority, and the complexities of Chinese politics would make a foreign commander’s role unmanageable. He promised, however, to give careful thought to the president’s suggestions.
In August 1944, at Chiang’s request, Roosevelt chose an interlocutor to stand between the Generalissimo and Stilwell. Patrick J. Hurley, Herbert Hoover’s suave secretary of war, would be the new ambassador to the Republic of China. In early 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor, Marshall had sent Hurley to the Far East to help rescue the besieged Americans at Bataan. Obviously unsuccessful in that impossible assignment, he had nevertheless earned the respect of both Marshall and Stimson, who now helped secure the China mission for him.
In his directive to Hurley of August 18, composed by Marshall, FDR specified that he was to “promote efficient and harmonious relations between the Generalissimo and General Stilwell.”35 Hurley failed. From Stilwell’s point of view he was a bad choice. Though he knew little of China, the Oklahoman, despite an initially favorable view of Mao, soon became a zealous anti-Communist who disowned Stilwell when he recommended turning to the Yan’an-based Communists for help against the enemy. Fed up once more with all the sound and fury, FDR now again determined that Stilwell must go. At a meeting with the president on October 15 Marshall defended his friend. But for naught; this time FDR was adamant. Two days later Marshall radioed Stilwell that he was being recalled. He would be replaced as American commander in China by another Marshall favorite, Albert Wedemeyer.*
The Stilwell-Chiang dispute was in many ways a classic tempest in a teapot. It did not vitally effect the outcome of the war. China never became a major contributor to Japan’s defeat; the occupiers were evicted from the Asian mainland only when Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allies aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay in August 1945. But the wrangle of the two men would foreshadow the poisonous struggle in the minds of Americans over China’s postwar fate. Marshall, much to his regret, would, through his role in the “China Tangle,” be swept up in the domestic political storm over the “international Communist threat” that enveloped the early postwar years.
The Stilwell affair also contributes to our reservations about Marshall’s judgment of men. No one can dispute Stilwell’s formidable credentials for his China mission. But like Fredendall, he was temperamentally unsuited to high military command. Could Marshall have known this, or was his personal affection for the Stilwells enough to blind him to Vinegar Joe’s damaging personal flaws? In his later years Marshall would deny he had known the incompetent Lloyd Fredendall well, but when he selected him as a Torch commander he seemed quite familiar with him. In any event, he could not deny that Stilwell was a close personal friend. In both cases of poor choice Marshall eventually acknowledged his mistake, but meanwhile valuable time, effort—and lives—had been expended needlessly.
China was not the only mainland Asian theater that came into Marshall’s ken. Among the many issues considered at the Allied Quadrant Conference in August 1943, held in the Citadelle high above the picturesque French-Canadian town of Quebec, were British-American differences over Burma, the Japanese-occupied British colony adjacent to China’s western boundary and its land connection to the outside world. There FDR, Churchill, and Canadian prime minister William Mackenzie King, along with the Combined Chiefs and the usual large cast of supporting military and diplomatic players, plotted the course of Allied military operations for the remainder of 1943 and for 1944.
From Marshall’s professional perspective the decisions regarding European operations were the most significant strategic results at Quebec. The highlight of the meetings was the confirmation of May 1, 1944, as the date for Overlord, the cross-Channel invasion. But not without conditions on the British part: The operation would take place only if the German defenders could muster no more than twelve mobile divisions, if German airpower on the Continent could first be seriously eroded, if the artificial harbors (“Mulberries”)being prepared for the invasion could be made ready in time. On a personal level for Marshall these decisions highlighted the urgent issue of who should be the supreme commander of Overlord, whenever it should be launched.
Now—two years after Pearl Harbor—the center of military gravity between the Allies had shifted decisively to the larger, richer United States. Churchill and FDR had now agreed that the supreme commander of Overlord must be an American. Yet for CIGS Alan Brooke, whatever his personal doubts about the operation itself, hope lingered that he might be its commander, and he was surprised when the prime minister now told him that the choice would be Marshall. How did Brooke feel about it? Churchill asked. Brooke’s outward response was reserved, as his British upper-class code required: He was “disappointed,” he told the prime minister. But in fact Brooke was devastated. It was “a crushing blow,” he later acknowledged, and he was “swamped by a dark cloud of despair.”36
Marshall, on the other hand, had made no secret of his hopes. As he had remarked to Stimson sometime earlier, every soldier would prefer a field command. The leadership of the momentous cross-Channel invasion would be the apex of his life as an army officer; it would raise him to the eminence of his hero and mentor, John Pershing. Even before Quadrant he knew of the still-confidential decision to choose an American and assumed that he would be designated. With her husband’s change of status apparently imminent, Katherine had packed the family furniture and quietly moved out of the chief of staff’s quarters at Fort Myer. The confident Marshall, meanwhile, hinted to several colleagues that he was looking forward to seeing them in London when he took command of Overlord at the beginning of the New Year.
But of course it was not to be. As rumors of the probable appointment began to leak, public opinion turned unfavorable. Not out of disdain for Marshall, however. Most of the demurrers believed him too valuable in place; others held that the choice was a British plot to get rid of a strong defender of American interests. Even General Pershing deplored the possible change: To transfer “our most accomplished officer” to a “tactical command in a limited area,” he wrote to FDR, would be to waste his “outstanding strategical ability and experience.”37 In the face of the skeptical response FDR put the decision on hold. To choose Marshall as supreme commander would surely mean bringing Eisenhower to Washington to take his place, and Roosevelt did not feel comfortable with such a switch. As he later said, he could not sleep easily with Marshall away from Washington. At Quadrant, Marshall resigned himself to accepting his fate, whatever it might be. Though he had aggressively fought for advancement in rank during the parched years of the twenties and thirties, now, true to his austere ethic, he refused to push his claim. The final decision was postponed.
For the British the war against Japan was a minor issue at Quebec. Consideration of Pacific matters, they insisted, could well be postponed until after Germany’s defeat. But if the Americans demanded major operations against the Japanese before that time, for the sake of preserving resources for Europe, they should be conducted primarily by the U.S. Navy. Any simultaneous thrust due northward by MacArthur would be a costly duplication of effort.
At Quebec the Americans, of course, could not afford to be as blasé about the Pacific theater as their ally. Marshall still put the cross-Channel operation first. But he bridled at British indifference to the Japanese menace. The war with Japan, he believed, must not be pushed aside until some indeterminate time when all the loose ends in Europe had been neatly tied up. Admiral King, as usual, took the lead in advancing the claims of the Pacific theater, once more demanding an increased allotment of resources to defeat Japan. Marshall may not have approved of such a redistribution, but at Quebec he endorsed King’s Central Pacific advance, which made the long-planned attack on Rabaul irrelevant. Now, instead of risking the high cost of subduing sixty to one hundred thousand entrenched, battle-hardened Japanese troops, fully prepared to die rather than surrender, the base would simply be bypassed. MacArthur subsequently claimed credit for this “leapfrogging” tactic that promised to spare American lives. In fact it was King who originally endorsed bypassing Rabaul, though MacArthur would employ the tactic to good effect in his advance toward the Philippines in later months. Not until Quadrant, however, was it applied formally, when the Allies decided to skip Rabaul, isolating the enemy forces and leaving them to rot on the vine.
Mainland East Asia, too, got its share of attention at Quebec. To Marshall and his colleagues, Burma’s fate mattered, for as China’s land connection to the outside world, it impinged directly on the fortunes of the Far Eastern war. For the British, though retaking the region promised to restore a lost portion of the empire and reverse an inglorious defeat, they did not give the operation a high priority. Churchill for one, despised “jungles,” which he considered impossible terrain for military success, and did not accept American faith in China’s ability to help defeat Japan.38 Yet under the code name Anakim, early in 1943, the Allies had prepared a plan to recapture all of Burma, including the northeast, adjacent to China, which served Sino-American interests, not just the south, adjacent to India and Malaya, which served British imperial goals. Unfortunately several minor military setbacks convinced the British, who resented American pressure, that they lacked the resources to oust the Japanese from the region. At the Trident Conference in May the Allies agreed to a contracted version of Anakim that limited it to the northeastern quadrant of Burma, the part closest to the severed Burma Road. Chinese forces would attack the enemy from Yunnan and from new bases in India, while British and British colonial troops would advance eastward from India and launch amphibious operations against the Japanese along the Bay of Bengal coast, as well as an offensive in Burma’s occupied central area.
Neither the British nor the Chinese were enthusiastic about the modified Anakim scheme, and they dithered and vacillated, unconscionably in Marshall’s view. At Quadrant in August he badgered his British colleagues for action in Burma, seeking to deflect a Churchillian peripheral scheme to invade Sumatra and once more making the point to the dubious British that China must be allowed to make a major contribution to Japan’s defeat. But Marshall simply could not wait for Anakim in any version. For a time he placed his hope for a successful campaign to reopen the Burmese supply route to China in Orde Wingate, a visionary and unconventional British army officer who had served his country ably in Palestine and fought the Italians successfully in Ethiopia. Wingate’s early 1943 behind-the-lines exploits in Burma, leading the so-called Chindits, a band of part Indian, part British irregulars, against the Japanese, had caught Churchill’s romantic fancy, and the PM had impulsively brought him to Quebec to join the discussions. There the young officer had also impressed Marshall, who endorsed a second Chindit incursion against the Japanese.
Marshall would be disappointed with Wingate. His second “long-range penetration” of 1944 failed when the British refused to deploy further ground forces in support. Revived as an air operation, it failed again. On March 4, 1944, while returning to his field headquarters, Wingate died when his plane crashed.
But while Far Eastern military operations hung fire, larger political issues regarding China came to the fore. FDR was determined, as Chiang had long hoped, to establish the parity of China with America, Britain, and Russia. He also sought to bolster Chinese morale and resolve, and in the fall of 1943, over Churchill’s objections, invited Chiang to join the Western Allies at the first Sextant Conference at Cairo. Chiang was delighted to attend. His delegation would include Madame Chiang as her husband’s chief translator and back stiffener.
The American delegation flew into Cairo on the afternoon of November 21 after some aerial sightseeing of recent Eighth Army battlefields in Egypt and Libya along the way. Chiang and his entourage reached Cairo a little too early to suit Churchill, who, besides his skeptical view of China’s potential, preferred the Western Allies to settle their remaining differences over Europe in private before discussing Far Eastern issues.
Marshall had met Mai-ling Soong in Washington some months before, but never the Generalissimo. Despite Stilwell’s and Brooke’s caustic estimates he took a liking to the benevolent-miened, scholarly-looking head of the Kuomintang and found reasons to excuse his shortcomings. And his opinion would never change. After the war he told Forrest Pogue: “I was and am fond of Chiang Kai-shek.” Admittedly “he had a terrible problem getting good men” and many of his circle were corrupt. But he “was personally no grafter.”39
At Cairo, Marshall reiterated, over Brooke’s doubts, that China could make a major contribution to the war against the Japanese. He acknowledged Chinese failings. True, at first they had resisted deploying ground troops against the enemy. They had also, he agreed, sought to limit Stilwell’s inspired scheme to bring Chinese divisions to Ramgarh in India for intensive retraining by American instructors and resupply with American arms. But they had since abandoned their obstructionism, he assured his colleagues at a Combined Chiefs discussion. And so it seemed. At the Sextant meetings Chiang expressed his willingness to accept the modified Anakim scheme to open up an overland resupply and reinforcement route through Burma. But there was a catch: To draw off Japanese troops the British must promise to mount naval and amphibious operations in the Bay of Bengal, a proposal made by Mountbatten and endorsed by Marshall. Despite Chinese qualifiers, Marshall and King both considered this response a breakthrough; the Chinese were actually going to engage the common enemy after years of inaction.
But then Chiang spoiled the favorable effect by demanding that besides the land campaign in Burma the Western Allies continue to deliver ten thousand tons of supplies a month over the Hump. Marshall and the other planners were offended. They not only believed the proposal unrealistic; they resented the arrogant tone of the Chinese negotiators: They had “rights” in the matter, a Chinese general had aggressively announced in defending his country’s position. Already worried about starving the military buildup in Europe for lack of air transport, Marshall exploded: “Now let me get this straight. You are talking about your ‘rights’ in this matter. I thought these were American planes, and American personnel, and American material. I don’t understand what you mean by saying we can or can’t do thus and so.”40
Ultimately the first Cairo Conference failed to achieve, as the Americans had hoped, the incorporation of China as an equal partner in the United Nations’ anti-Axis coalition. Undoubtedly the reality of China’s real weaknesses was a critical factor for failure. But the Nationalists’ domestic agenda and Chiang’s recalcitrance also played a part in the outcome. SEAC supreme commander Mountbatten summed up Cairo’s disappointing results on the China question. Negotiating with Chiang, he noted, had been totally frustrating for the Western leaders and their staffs. “[We] have been driven absolutely mad,” he noted in his diary.41
And in the end, the Burma theater would never make an important contribution to Allied victory. The Bay of Bengal attack was quickly abandoned. In the spring of 1944, under British general William Slim, an ill-conceived Japanese thrust into India was blocked at Imphal, and finally in early 1945 Slim’s forces invaded Burma and, with rare good luck and brilliant generalship, retook the former colony. Coincidentally Chinese troops briefly joined the Nineteenth Indian Division in northern Burma to open the long-severed Burma Road. But once that was attained and supplies flowed freely to the Nationalists by land, they were withdrawn to prepare for the coming struggle for domestic supremacy with Mao and his forces. Slim’s victories, then, were achieved without aid from Chiang Kai-shek and his ragged army.
The opening Cairo meetings were followed by an important conclave of the Big Three heads of state and their staffs at Tehran in Iran (see chapter 8) and then a return to Cairo to complete the Anglo-American conference. Chiang and most of the Chinese delegation had now returned home, but Far Eastern issues were not ignored. It was at this second session of the Cairo gathering that FDR decided to cancel the Bay of Bengal operations as a serious drain on the vital LST landing craft essential for Overlord.
By the end of 1943, as the Sextant meetings adjourned, the Pacific and Asian theaters had been placed in perspective. They would remain subordinate to operations in Europe and the Mediterranean. No matter what the pressure on Americans for an early Pearl Harbor payback, the final campaign against Japan would come later. The China-Burma-India theater, particularly, would remain a sideshow. In fact, China itself, even in American estimates, would cease to be regarded as a major player in the anti-Axis war. The Pacific could not be neglected, of course: If nothing else, King and the navy would not allow it. But whatever China’s role, the U.S. Army, too, could not avoid a strong commitment. First there was MacArthur to reckon with. He commanded and demanded attention. Despite the Europe First commitment of Marshall and his Pentagon colleagues, the army forces in the Pacific would grow between the end of 1942 and December 1943 from 350,000 to almost 700,000 men. This figure was more than 100,000 greater than the planners had assumed in a March 1943 estimate. Nevertheless MacArthur and his partisans were right; in the eyes of Marshall and the War Department, Europe still came first.
When Marshall left Cairo for his round-the-world trip in December 1943, Japan was still a formidable foe capable of exacting on land, sea, and in the air a high price for any gains by its enemies. Not until 1945, when it was beaten into submission, was it less than a cornered tiger, a fierce and dangerous adversary. In the Pacific arena Marshall had been a force in the affairs of China but not with notable success. The failure would bode ill for his and his country’s postwar relations with China. In the remainder of the Pacific he had been a secondary player, with King and MacArthur running the show. But now the chief of staff’s mind was centered once more on events across the Atlantic where the climactic battles against the senior enemy were already under way.