Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

Although the truth would not come out until years later, MacArthur’s conduct on the first day of the war had been at least as culpable as that of Kimmel or Short. Receiving nine hours’ warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, MacArthur had remained cocooned at his headquarters and refused to communicate with his air commanders, despite their repeated efforts to reach him. As a result, his main force of B-17 bombers and P-40 fighters was paralyzed for lack of orders, and more than half of the aircraft were destroyed on the ground by the first Japanese air raid on Philippine territory.

Leaders in Washington were dismayed by this “second Pearl Harbor,” hours after the first, but no one outside a privileged circle even knew that it had happened.

The different standards of accountability imposed in Hawaii and the Philippines have bothered historians ever since. The latter events were never formally investigated, and MacArthur never answered for errors and derelictions that seemed at least as blameworthy and certainly more avoidable than those in Hawaii.

Very suddenly, in those early days of the war, Douglas MacArthur rocketed to superstardom in the American media, attaining a degree of fame, celebrity, and popularity unmatched by any other military commander. His rocket would soar over the Pacific, in a majestic, high-flying trajectory, until Harry Truman shot it down ten years later.

Between December 8, 1941, and March 11, 1942, MacArthur’s headquarters issued 142 press communiqués. One hundred nine mentioned only one person by name: MacArthur.

He noted that Marshall did not even hint at the “psychological effects” on the American people, but he thought the implication was impossible to miss: “Clearly he felt that anyone stupid enough to overlook this consideration had no business wearing the star of a brigadier general.”

No matter how the figures were calculated, Bataan would run out of provisions, ammunition, and other needed supplies long before the Allies could mobilize forces on a scale needed to return to the Philippines. On the other hand, Eisenhower told Marshall, the besieged army could not be “cold-bloodedly” abandoned to the enemy. Even if hard military logic dictated cutting losses, the United States was a great nation with a reputation to uphold.

Mulling it over in his diary on February 23, Eisenhower recorded prophetic views about MacArthur: “He is doing a good job where he is, but I’m doubtful that he’ll do so well in more complicated situations. Bataan is made to order for him. It’s in the public eye; it has made him a public hero; it has all the essentials of drama; and he is the acknowledged king on the spot. If brought out, public opinion will force him into a position where his love of the limelight may ruin him.”

Eisenhower would play no role in the Pacific War—he would be busy elsewhere—but in early 1942 he foresaw all of the various headaches that MacArthur would cause for leaders in Washington. MacArthur would use his political influence and his unparalleled access to the American media to demand that more troops, ships, and airplanes be sent to his command. He would reject the “Europe-first” principle as a basis for global strategy. He would meddle in Australian politics. He would insist on running the naval war in the Pacific. He would claim the right to liberate all of the Philippines before any final offensive against Japan. Leaders in Washington would have to reckon with MacArthur’s singular influence at every stage of the coming war, Eisenhower predicted, for “the public has built itself a hero out of its own imagination.”

Equally pressing was the question of the navy’s status in the postwar defense establishment. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, congressional leaders of both parties had vowed to streamline the military’s organizational chart. The War and Navy Departments, which had been independent and coequal since the administration of John Adams, were to be merged into a unitary department of defense under a single civilian cabinet officer. Although the specific arrangements remained to be negotiated, the army, navy, marines, and air forces would be fused into an integrated command structure. FDR persuaded Congress to postpone those reforms until the war was won—but anyone could foresee that service unification was destined to be a political brawl of epic proportions, in which the navy had much to lose in the way of command autonomy and clout.

In a remark that circulated widely in Washington, Davis observed that King’s idea of a press policy was to tell the public nothing until the end of the war, and then to issue a two-word communiqué: “We won.”

King believed that the existing Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) organization was working well enough, and that a service unification bill should be postponed until the end of the war.

Beginning in the spring of 1944, FDR and his circle had a compelling new reason to keep the press at bay. His health had taken a turn for the worse, and Washington was pulsating with rumors that he did not have the strength to remain in office.

In March 1944, a navy cardiologist, Dr. Howard Bruenn, had found severely elevated blood pressure and diagnosed an acute case of congestive heart failure. Given the treatment options available in the 1940s, the patient’s chances of living through another four-year presidential term were not good. The median survival rate after such a diagnosis was less than two years.

Axis propaganda had made a fetish out of physical virility and strength, and had tried to make the wheelchair-bound Roosevelt a symbol of Western democratic decrepitude. His domestic political adversaries had spread rumors that he was in poor health, and would pounce on any evidence that the rumors were true. For all of these reasons, Dr. Bruenn’s diagnosis was treated as a state secret, and reporters and photographers were rarely permitted into FDR’s presence.

FDR thus effectively chose his successor in a seemingly spontaneous, seat-of-the-pants exchange with the DNC chairman, even though his doctors had reason to doubt that he could survive another term in office.

On July 20, the Democratic Convention in Chicago nominated the president for a fourth term. With the train sitting at the Marine Corps railroad siding, Roosevelt gave a fifteen-minute acceptance speech, which was broadcast to the convention by radio.

IN MARCH 1944, THE JOINT CHIEFS HAD ORDERED MacArthur and Nimitz to cooperate in seizing Palau, a group of Japanese-held islands in southern Micronesia, with a deadline of September 15; and Mindanao, the big southern island of the Philippines, with a deadline of November 15.

Philippines were the cynosure of MacArthur’s war, and he continued to press Washington to endorse his preferred southern line of attack. He wanted to concentrate all available U.S. forces (including the Pacific Fleet) to liberate the northern island of Luzon, including the capital city of Manila, before undertaking any further amphibious invasions to the north. Admiral King and most of the internal JCS planners preferred to bypass Luzon and aim their next major thrust at the island of Formosa (Taiwan).

As the Baltimore carried the president to Hawaii, invasion forces were in the process of seizing the Mariana Islands of Saipan, Guam, and Tinian. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea (June 19–20, 1944), a naval air battle west of the Marianas, the Japanese had lost about three hundred aircraft and three aircraft carriers.

Although the regime in Tokyo was not prepared to face facts, the loss of the Marianas and the destruction of its carrier airpower marked Japan’s irreversible strategic defeat in the Pacific War.

In early 1943, the planning arm of the JCS had circulated a “Strategic Plan for the Defeat of Japan.” This document envisioned a vital role for China in the last stage of the Pacific War, as a base for bombing raids against Japan and as a source of infantry manpower to destroy the Japanese armies in Asia and (if necessary) the Japanese home islands. To carry it off, the Allies would need to land on the coast of mainland China, and the island of Formosa seemed to offer the key that would unlock the continent’s front door. This China-centric vision of the Pacific endgame created momentum in Washington for the navy’s preferred central Pacific line of attack, which ran through Micronesia, the Marianas, and Formosa.

In November 1943, the JSSC had rendered a unanimous and “unequivocal” judgment that the central Pacific offensive was more important than MacArthur’s South Pacific campaign, because it offered the shorter route to Japan, and therefore “the key to the early defeat of Japan lies in all-out operations through the Central Pacific, with supporting operations on the northern and southern flanks—using all forces, naval, air and ground, that can be maintained and employed profitably in these areas.”

Each new study tended to reinforce the panel’s past conclusions—that MacArthur’s South Pacific campaign had become redundant, that the dispersal of effort in the Pacific risked prolonging the war, and that Japan’s evident weakness invited a more direct assault upon the enemy’s inner ring of defenses. In the committee’s considered judgment, that pointed to Formosa.

Now that Australia was secure and Allied forces had smashed through the Bismarcks barrier, it was time to wind down the southern offensive. Mindanao was the logical terminus for MacArthur’s campaign. In one of King’s regular off-the-record press briefings in Alexandria, he told the reporters that recapturing the Philippines was “sentimentally desirable” but “eccentric,” and would likely delay victory in the Pacific by three to six months.16 To Rear Admiral Daniel E. Barbey, MacArthur’s amphibious fleet commander, King acidly remarked that “MacArthur seemed more interested in making good his promise to return to the Philippines than in winning the war.”

Although the burial details had been working in shifts, the sickly sweet reek of rotting corpses was pervasive and inescapable. After a month on Saipan, Smith and his troops had ceased to notice it.

At some point that day, King asked Spruance about his preparations for Operation CAUSEWAY, the prospective invasion of Formosa. The Fifth Fleet chief answered frankly: “I don’t like Formosa.”19 Instead, he proposed to seize Iwo Jima and Okinawa, in that order.

Okinawa was smaller than Formosa, and thus more manageable. The island was of ideal size for Allied purposes, said Spruance—small enough to conquer in a matter of weeks, but large enough to serve as a base of operations against the Japanese home islands. It was strategically located along sea routes linking Japan to its southern resource territories. Okinawa offered many potential landing sites, so the defenders would not be able to concentrate their firepower against any one beach. The island could serve either as a stepping stone to the China coast or a launchpad for an invasion of Kyushu.

Many doubted whether Formosa was worth the immense effort; the invasion would rival the scale of the D-Day landings in Normandy. And if it turned out to be absolutely necessary to take Formosa, they told King, they would first need the airfields of Luzon and the fleet base at Manila Bay, so bypassing the Philippines was not an option.

Admiral John H. Towers, the deputy CINCPAC, stressed that neither Guam nor Saipan offered sufficient port facilities to mount an invasion force large enough to take the big Chinese island.

As Nimitz was wrapping up the talks, King turned to Carney and asked him to repeat his objections to Formosa once more for the record, to be certain that they were entered into the conference minutes. One can scarcely imagine Douglas MacArthur soliciting the contrary views of a subordinate in such a setting.

During the crisis of early 1942, as Japanese forces overran the Philippines, President Quezon had considered giving himself up to the enemy and suing for peace. MacArthur had half-endorsed this proposal on the grounds that it might alleviate the Filipino people’s suffering. But FDR had rejected it categorically. In a letter to President Quezon he had pledged: “Whatever happens to the present American garrison, we shall not relax our efforts until the forces which we are now marshalling outside the Philippine Islands return to the Philippines and drive the last remnant of the invaders from your soil.”69 The wording of that oath would seem to leave little room for maneuver.

If ever a commander had earned the right to petition for a decision on such grounds, MacArthur was that man. Since December 1941—and even since the Spanish-American War, one might say—American honor, prestige, and credibility had been at stake in the Philippines. Since the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, the chief aim of U.S. policy had been to assist the Filipino people in constructing a functioning democracy capable of repelling aggressors.

For FDR, the successful decolonization of the Philippines was to set a righteous example for the world, and especially for the British. In this terrible global war, no major strategic decision could be separated from its long-term political or foreign policy consequences.

FDR remained seated in the back of the red touring car, hat pushed back on his forehead, and watched an hour-long live firing demonstration through binoculars. Green-clad infantrymen crawled under wire, then rose and advanced across a field in a line abreast, firing machine guns and flamethrowers from the hip. The finale was a coordinated practice assault on a plywood mockup of a Japanese village. Then the motorcade headed south on the coast road, stopped at the Naval Air Station at Kaneohe Bay, and returned to Waikiki (as the White House daily log noted) by way of “Kaialua, the Amphibious Base at Waimanalo, Koko Head, the Coast Guard Base at Wailupi and Diamond Head.”

After an hour touring the wards, FDR was back in the car and off to Naval Air Station, Honolulu—now the Honolulu International Airport—and then to Hickam Field, where one of the big four-engine Douglas “flying ambulances” had just touched down and taxied to a stop.

The last stop of the day’s inspection tour was the new Aiea Naval Hospital, which sat atop a hill east of Pearl Harbor.

In one ward, McIntire went ahead and was talking to a marine who “did not seem to have a whole bone left in his body.” His face, ravaged by pain, was set in lines of utter dejection, but when he looked around and saw who was approaching, the youngster’s mouth flew open in the widest and most delighted grin I have ever seen. “Gee!” he exclaimed. “The President!” So it was down the whole long line of beds in every ward. Not one of us but felt, actually felt, the wave of hope that swept the hospital as shattered men saw before them not merely the President of the United States but another human being, once struck down as they themselves were stricken, who had triumphed over physical disability by force of will and invincibility of spirit.

took place on the manicured lawn of the Holmes villa on Waikiki Beach, with FDR seated on a wicker garden couch and the journalists drawn up in a semicircle.

“Neither one nor the other.” Would General MacArthur liberate the Philippines, as he had pledged to do? “We are going to get the Philippines back, and without question General MacArthur will take a part in it. Whether he goes direct or not, I can’t say.”

Defining “unconditional surrender” had been a recurring nuisance since FDR had first articulated the controversial formula—suddenly and rashly, it seemed to many—at a press conference in Casablanca in January 1943. Although the doctrine had been discussed in Allied conferences, British prime minister Winston Churchill had not agreed to it before the president blurted it out to an audience of international newsmen. The president’s public statement made it a fait accompli, however, and Churchill was left with no choice but to affirm British support. FDR was determined to avoid a reprise of the peace that followed the First World War, when a German “stab in the back” myth ignited the rise of the Nazi party. But many Allied military and civilian leaders privately believed that broadcasting a demand for unconditional surrender was a costly blunder—that the Axis nations would seize upon the announcement as evidence that the Allies intended to destroy and enslave them, thus reinforcing the determination of their military forces and civilians to fight to the last ditch.

Apart from the immediate boost it provided to Nazi and Japanese domestic propaganda, the “unconditional surrender” formulation was troublesome because it was ambiguous. It was easier to define it in the abstract than to explain how it would be applied in practice. Efforts to clarify it only tended to raise more questions. Whatever answers were given in public could be (and were) seized upon and distorted by the Axis propaganda mills.

Therefore, it was necessary to insist upon the formality of an unconditional surrender. Behind that formality, however, lay the implied promise of a magnanimous peace. It might even be said that the lesson of FDR’s parable was that if the Germans and Japanese would first agree to surrender unconditionally, they could anticipate that all reasonable requests would subsequently be granted. But what requests were reasonable? And how could the defeated nations know in advance, without appearing to bargain? Therein lay the intractable problem with the “unconditional surrender” formulation. It was, in a sense, a paradox. In plain terms, it stated that the victors would treat the vanquished as they chose, without regard to their wishes or interests. But its tacit meaning, according to FDR, was very nearly the opposite.

As the Baltimore put to sea that evening from Pearl Harbor, Admiral Leahy collected his thoughts and committed them to his diary. General MacArthur, he observed, “seems to be chiefly interested in retaking the Philippines,” and had not yet given much thought to the endgame in the Pacific. But both MacArthur and Nimitz had expressed agreement in principle that “Japan can be forced to accept our terms of surrender by the use of sea and air power without an invasion of the Japanese homeland.”87 In the long run, Leahy believed, this consensus of the two theater commanders—that an invasion of Japan should be avoided—was to have greater significance than the immediate question of whether to strike first at Luzon or Formosa.

FDR and Leahy were among the handful of Allied leaders who were fully briefed on the Manhattan Project.

FDR and his representatives had repeatedly asked Josef Stalin for assurances that the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan after the defeat of Nazi Germany. In mid-1944, this was the American government’s single greatest objective in its diplomacy with Moscow. But would the Red Army really be needed against Japan?

the event that the regime in Tokyo did surrender, would Japan’s vast overseas armies—in Manchuria, Korea, China, and elsewhere—also lay down arms? Or would they fight to the last man, as they had done in every battle of the war?

Many Allied military commanders stated flatly that no Japanese ground force would ever willingly surrender, even if the government in Tokyo gave up—and predicted that they would have to be eradicated root and branch in whatever territory they occupied. If that was the case, the Americans badly wanted the Soviets to invade Manchuria and destroy Japan’s million-man Kwantung Army. Likewise, they wanted the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek to do most of the fighting (and the dying) in China. On the other hand, if Hirohito could be persuaded to order his far-flung armies to capitulate, and if those armies would obey the distant man-god’s command, the Pacific War might be won more quickly and with less bloodletting than the pessimists anticipated. In that case, the Russians might not be needed in the war against Japan, which meant that the Americans need not horse-trade with Stalin for his commitment,

His insistence upon delegating authority down the line of command tended to bring out the best in subordinates. He kept his mind clear of details in order to focus on the big picture; he refused to consider minor issues because he was storing up his mental energy for the major ones. His daily 5-mile deck hikes kept him healthy and fit. The physical exercise helped him sleep soundly at night, even while under the strain of prolonged operations in enemy waters. As others in the fleet grew exhausted and edgy, Spruance remained fresh and well rested. He told his wife in a letter from sea, “If I don’t exercise, I don’t feel as well and I get nervous and mentally depressed . . . I am in tip-top condition and intend to stay that way in order to do my job, which, after all, is an important one.”

More than ever before, seagoing commanders were rated according to their mental and physical stamina. When a visitor went aboard the Indianapolis in the summer of 1944, he noted that the Fifth Fleet staff officers were “dog-tired and showed it.”