Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45. Max Hastings
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commander, together with ambition close to megalomania and consistently poor judgement as a picker of subordinates. Fortunately for his public image, only Roosevelt and a handful of others were aware of the general’s acceptance in March 1942 of $500,000 from the Philippines Treasury, as a personal gift from President Manuel Quezon. This was an extraordinarily improper transaction on the part of both donor and recipient.
The British always acknowledged that their own forces and commanders performed poorly in the 1941-42 Burma and Malaya campaigns. Operations in the Philippines were equally mismanaged, but in those dark days Americans yearned for heroes. President and people colluded to make one of MacArthur, to forge a heroic myth around the defender of Bataan. Americans found it unthinkable that the US army which slowly assembled in Australia through 1942 and 1943 should be led into battle by anyone else.
MacArthur presided over campaigns to regain dominance of New Guinea and the islands of the south-west Pacific which proved protracted and bitter, and at first yielded little glory. Yet so formidable was the general’s publicity machine, so impressive his personality, that he held his job until the victories began to come. There were demands from the US political right that he should be made the nation’s global supreme commander, or accept nomination as a presidential candidate, neither of which notions he seemed eager to dismiss. Foremost among proponents of the ‘man of destiny’ view of history, he was bent upon becoming the lone star of America’s Pacific war. Everything within his compass was subordinated to that purpose. A blizzard of personal publicity accompanied his every movement, readily supported by US newspaper moguls—Hearst, McCormick, Patterson—who loved the general. Twelve full-length biographies were published in the course of the war, their flavour conveyed by a sample title, MacArthur the Magnificent, which did nothing to check his egomania.
The senior Allied commander who afterwards spoke most warmly of MacArthur was Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, the dour, clever Northern Irishman who was Britain’s principal wartime chief of staff. Brooke’s assessment was astonishingly effusive: ‘From everything I saw of him, he was the greatest general of the last war. He certainly showed a far greater strategic grasp than Marshall.’ Such a testimonial should not be altogether ignored, but Brooke knew little of either MacArthur or the Japanese war. Top Americans obliged to work with the ‘hero of Bataan’ adopted a much more sceptical view. His fitness for high command was disputed by many senior officers, foremost among them the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King, another Olympian autocrat. King’s daughter described her father as an entirely even-tempered man: ‘He was always angry.’ Such was the admiral’s personal animus against the general that, at a joint chiefs of staff meeting, Marshall—himself no admirer of MacArthur—felt obliged to thump the table and silence a tirade from King: ‘I will not have any meeting carried on with this hatred.’
MacArthur’s critics believed that an advance across the south-west Pacific was irrelevant to America’s strategic requirements, and was promoted only by the general’s ambition to liberate the Philippines. He shamelessly manipulated communiqués about his forces’ achievements, personally selected photographs of himself for press release, deprived subordinates of credit for successes, shrugged off his own responsibility for failures. He was a man of fierce passions, whom ‘joy or sorrow would set…off on lusty zooms or steep dives’, in the words of a subordinate. ‘At the risk of being naive and just plain dumb,’ wrote Maj.-Gen. St Clair Streett, later commander of the Thirteenth Air Force, assessing Pacific command in October 1942, ‘the major obstacle for a sane military solution of the problem [is] General MacArthur…even the President himself might find his hands tied in dealing with the general.’ The sooner MacArthur was out of the Pacific, thought Streett, the sooner would it be possible to establish a rational command structure for the theatre.
A senior British airman, no stranger to tensions in his own nation’s high command, was nonetheless awed by those between America’s armed forces: ‘The violence of inter-service rivalry…in those days had to be seen to be believed, and was an appreciable handicap to their war effort.’ Even where armed services dislike each other institutionally, successful cooperation can be achieved if individual commanders forge working relationships. MacArthur, however, was interested in achieving harmony only in pursuit of his own objectives. Admiral King likewise placed the long-term interests of the US Navy far above any tactical conveniences related to fighting the Japanese. No overall Pacific supreme commander was ever appointed, because neither army nor navy could stomach the explicit triumph of the other service. And even if the resultant division of authority impeded the defeat of Japan, so prodigious were US resources that the nation felt able to indulge it.
MacArthur was never ill. When there was nowhere more distant to go, he paced his office to assuage his chronic restlessness. He made no jokes and possessed no small talk, though he would occasionally talk baseball to enlisted men, in attempts to deceive them that he was human. Marshall observed that MacArthur had a court, not a staff. Intimates of the ‘Bataan gang’, the handful of officers to whom he granted passages alongside his own family on the PT-boats escaping from the Philippines, remained privileged acolytes to the war’s end. SWPA chief of staff Lt-Gen. Richard Sutherland felt able to commission his Australian mistress in the American Women’s Army Corps, shipping her in his entourage until the scandal was exposed.
MacArthur’s belief that his critics were not merely wrong, but evil, verged on derangement. He claimed to perceive a ‘crooked streak’ in both Marshall and Eisenhower, two of the most honourable men in American public service. When the Office of War Information wished to alter for national consumption his legendary remark on quitting the Philippines from ‘I shall return’ to ‘We shall return,’ MacArthur demurred. Early in 1944, the general wrote to Stimson: ‘These frontal attacks by the Navy…are tragic and unnecessary massacres of American lives…The Navy fails to understand the strategy…Give me central direction of the war in the Pacific, and I will be in the Philippines in ten months…don’t let the Navy’s pride of position and ignorance continue this great tragedy to our country.’ MacArthur’s personal behaviour was no worse than that of Patton and Montgomery, but he exercised command under far less restraint than either.
Perhaps most distasteful of all his wartime actions was a flirtation with a 1944 presidential election run against Roosevelt, whose liberalism affronted his own rabidly conservative convictions. MacArthur’s staff corresponded with potential campaign backers in the US, which they could not have done without his knowledge. Lt-Gen. Robert Eichelberger asserted: ‘If it were not for his hatred, or rather the extent to which he despises FDR, he would not want [the presidency].’ The influential New York Times columnist Arthur Krock wrote in April 1944: ‘It is generally believed…that General MacArthur is dissatisfied with the military strategy of the war as approved by the President and Prime Minister Churchill.’ This was indeed so. Only when it became apparent that MacArthur could not defeat Thomas Dewey to secure the Republican presidential nomination did he finally exclude himself from candidacy.
He also possessed virtues, however. His air chief, George Kenney, observed shrewdly that ‘As a salesman, MacArthur has no superiors and few equals.’ The USAAF responded to the general’s enthusiasm for air power by offering its passionate support to his causes. Though MacArthur’s hostility towards Britain was well-known, British Brigadier Jack Profumo, attached to his staff, praised his private courtesy and warmth. The supreme commander’s senior British liaison officer described him to Churchill as ‘ruthless, vain, unscrupulous and self-conscious…but…a man of real calibre with a vivid imagination, a capacity to learn rapidly from the past, a leader of men…[with] a considerable understanding of personalities and political development’. MacArthur’s serene assurance, natural authority and charisma, lent some substance to his claims to rank. If he was not among history’s outstanding commanders, he acted the part of one with unshakeable conviction.
In late summer 1944, MacArthur’s credit as a strategist stood higher than it ever had before, or would again. In two months he had conducted a dramatic advance 1,200 miles up Papua-New Guinea, bypassing rather than lingering to destroy Japanese garrisons, staging a series of surprise amphibious assaults, of which the most recent and successful took place at Hollandia, where his headquarters was now being transferred. These achievements, however, won headlines without removing fundamental doubts about the usefulness