The admirals had refused to put the Pacific fleet at the disposal of any army officer, let alone MacArthur, whom they remembered as all too eager to risk carriers in the Philippines. The army, for its part, scoffed at serving under the navy. So even though the United States and Britain had agreed that each theater of the war should have a single commander—a principle known as unity of command—the animosity between the two major branches of America’s military forced the joint chiefs in Washington to split the Pacific Ocean into four sections.
