MacArthur seemed oblivious to all these dangers, marching from unit to unit, inquiring about their progress. Periodically, said General Kenney, who accompanied MacArthur’s party, Japanese soldiers could be heard shouting their usual billingsgate: “Fuck Erenor Roosfelt!” and “FDR eat shit!” which was gleefully answered by U.S. GIs, “Tojo eat shit!” (referring to the Japanese dictator). At one point a voice with a Japanese accent hollered out amid the sniping and machine-gunning, “Fuck Roy Acuff,” alluding to a popular country music singer of the day.§
As MacArthur stepped over a large log on the beach an infantryman crouched behind it gulped, “Hey, there’s General MacArthur.” His buddy, hunkered beside him, still staring ahead, responded, “Oh, yeah? And I suppose he’s got Eleanor Roosevelt along with him.”29
By late afternoon the American and Philippine flags flew atop two stripped coconut trees on Red Beach, the latter having been sewn together the night before by a sailmaker on the troop transport John Land. MacArthur paused for a moment to compose a letter to President Roosevelt, scribbled on a field message pad, which, being the first letter sent from the freed Philippines, MacArthur said he hoped might prove a welcome addition to Roosevelt’s famous stamp collection.
He told the president that the invasion was “going smoothly” and that when completed it would cut off the Japanese defensive line, while tactically severing in two the Japanese army in the Philippine Islands. MacArthur then arguably stepped over the line by advising the president to grant the Philippines independence immediately, a diplomatic move that would “electrify the world and redound immeasurably to the credit and honor of the United States for a thousand years.”
At one point, with gunfire rumbling in the distance, MacArthur stood before a microphone wired to a sound truck and in his best stentorian voice he delivered what would be remembered among his greatest orations. “People of the Philippines—I have returned,” he said. “By the grace of God our forces stand again on Philippine soil … The hour of your redemption is here … Rally to me. Let the indomitable spirit of Bataan and Corregidor lead on … Strike at every favorable opportunity. For your homes and hearths, strike! For future generations of your sons and daughters, strike! For your sacred dead, strike! Let no heart be faint. Let every arm be steeled. The guidance of divine God points the way. Follow in His name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!”
It had begun to rain and was getting late. MacArthur returned to the Nashville and slept the sleep of a satisfied mind. It was only a toehold they had on Leyte, but he felt confident that in the end his army would remain victorious. How he knew this was uncertain, but for a man with such a mind and such an ego, MacArthur was wise enough to realize that his deeds must match his words. Come morning he would visit with his troops again, unaware that something very nasty was brewing out on the dark and misty ocean.
* Banzai stood for, more or less, “May the Emperor live a thousand years.”
† The nurses were evacuated by submarine before the surrender, a feat that later became the inspiration for the 1959 Cary Grant movie Operation Petticoat.
‡ In the course of his Pacific tour Lindbergh flew in excess of fifty missions, more than was required from the army fliers; he flew frequently through enemy flak, bombed and strafed enemy ships and installations, and, during a dogfight, shot down a Japanese fighter.
§ A number of years ago the author found himself in the same makeup room with Roy Acuff at a public television station and asked about the story. He said, with some amusement, that he had heard it also, a number of times from different people, and assumed it was true.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
OVERLORD
George Marshall’s gravest concern of the war revolved around Overlord, the vast Allied amphibious invasion of Europe that almost everyone knew would be necessary for victory.* Not only was there constant friction with the British over the timing of the plan, but no one it seemed in the British government or its army could decide if they wanted to try it in the first place. The Americans had hoped to invade France in 1942, when the operation was code-named Sledgehammer, mainly to keep Russia in the war after Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had warned his country might lose to the Nazis unless the Allies opened a “second front” to draw off German troops.
But the British, ever cautious, didn’t feel the Allies could concentrate enough strength at that period and British officials—principally Winston Churchill—talked Marshall out of Sledgehammer until it was abandoned. Instead, at Churchill’s behest the U.S. and British armies launched Torch, the amphibious invasion of North Africa to take Tunisia, drive the Axis from the Mediterranean, and secure the Suez Canal. The landings, as we know, were successful, with George Patton leading the American contingent, but operations then bogged down and, instead of reaching Tunisia in a matter of weeks, it was nearly a year before the Germans and Italians were forced to surrender.
While Torch played out, Marshall once more began pushing for the big Allied invasion across the English Channel—now code-named Roundup—but again he was thwarted by Churchill, who pressed instead for an Allied assault to clear Sicily of Axis forces. Roundup was shelved, and the invasion—now, and forever, code-named Overlord—was rescheduled for 1944. Marshall was determined there would be no more postponements.
Incidental to Overlord was the question of American strategic bombing, which also produced friction with British planners. Early in the war, the Royal Air Force began attacking Germany with its long-range bombers, but it was soon discovered that between enemy fighters and antiaircraft fire the British were losing planes at an alarming rate. They switched from daylight to nighttime bombing and insisted to the Americans that daylight bombing was doomed to failure. Marshall and his colleagues in the U.S. Army Air Forces disagreed. They claimed that the new U.S. B-17 “flying fortress” was so heavily armed—ten to twelve .50-caliber machine guns—and well armored that the heavy bomber could fight off most enemy planes.
The argument went on, with Churchill “paint[ing] such vivid pictures of the ghastly casualties in store” that the British were gaining the upper hand. Until the Casablanca Conference, that is, when Marshall summoned the U.S. Eighth Air Force commanding general Ira C. Eaker from England to come to Morocco. When Eaker’s plane arrived, air force commander Hap Arnold was waiting for him with news that they had lost the argument and the Eighth Air Force was going to have to fly its missions at night. Eaker asked for one last try and a meeting was arranged with Churchill.
“What torpedoed Churchill was a phrase,” according to William Frye, an early Marshall biographer. Churchill was a master phrasemaker, Frye explained, “and was vulnerable to them too.” Eaker had come up with a doozie: “Bombing around the clock,” with the Eighth Air Force by day and the RAF by night. Eaker asked the startled prime minister what could be better to put the Germans off balance. Churchill thought for a moment, and then roared, “You haven’t convinced me you can do it! But you have convinced me you ought to have a chance!”1
While the resulting bombing campaign might not have shortened the war, it certainly proved highly destructive to Germany; 160,000 Allied airmen were killed and 33,700 Allied planes were lost, but as a consequence the principal German cities were destroyed and the main German manufacturing plants wrecked. Yet, even so, the Germans fought futilely on.
AFTER SICILY FELL TO THE ALLIES came the question of whether to invade Italy. The dictator Mussolini had been deposed and he’d fled to Germany, and the Italians essentially surrendered to the Allies, but the Germans retained a strong military presence in Italy and Hitler was not disposed to give it up. Churchill and the British were all for invading Italy, partially on the notion of being able to bomb Germany from bases in the north once the Germans were evicted. Churchill even argued that the Allies might be able to send an army through Italy into southern Austria—his hoary strategy of attacking Germans through Europe’s “soft underbelly.”
The British, nevertheless, had a reason to proceed very
carefully with any cross-Channel invasion of the French coast; in 1942 they sent a 7,000-man amphibious force, consisting mostly of Canadians, to assault the French village of Dieppe along Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The operation was a total disaster with half the men shot, drowned, or captured. Marshall, therefore, understood Britain’s reluctance to undertake a cross-Channel invasion, but he still believed that attacking the Germans in France was the most effective strategy. It was a constant worry of his that the British might again try to postpone Overlord, even though a hundred thousand American soldiers had poured into England, with more to come.
There was also reason to believe, however, that Churchill’s opposition to invading through France wasn’t purely rational. His personal physician informed Marshall, “You are fighting the dead on the Somme” (the 1916 battle in World War I in which 50,000 British soldiers were killed). The physician said Churchill thought half a million Allied soldiers would be lost invading France and that the English Channel would be “littered with floating bodies.” (Churchill had an obsession with the Channel, his doctor said.) Marshall came to believe that because of their horrendous experiences in the First World War the British simply did not want to fight in France—ever.
Still, as the proper time for Overlord approached, it was assumed that Marshall would personally command the operation—which would become the largest amphibious assault in the world. He had been in the army more than forty years and on only a handful of occasions had he commanded troops. There is no doubt that Marshall craved the assignment.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson had personally gone to Churchill in the summer of 1943 to secure his blessing for Marshall as commander. At first, Churchill was reluctant, not because he mistrusted Marshall’s abilities—“he regarded Marshall as the greatest military figure of the war”—but because he believed that he could do more good in his present position. Stimson weighed his options carefully, and during the Allied conference in Quebec in August, with Churchill’s blessing, he named Marshall commander of the greatest military operation of the war.
After the Marshall decision was made, highly placed individuals began discussing it “with long faces and shaking heads.” Admirals King and Leahy, and air force chief Hap Arnold—privately and separately—urged Roosevelt to reconsider the nomination. They argued that Marshall was too much needed as head of the Joint Chiefs. When Roosevelt asked King for an alternative, he replied, “Eisenhower is a natural.”
Others involved with the Joint Chiefs or with army affairs worked behind the scenes to scuttle Marshall’s assignment. A letter to the president signed by none other than the aged General of the Armies John J. Pershing warned that Marshall’s absence from Washington “would be a fundamental and very grave error in our military policy.”2
Marshall apparently knew nothing of these intrigues and never told a soul—unless it was Mrs. Marshall—how he felt about the issue, which came to a head several months later when Roosevelt sent for him.
The president wanted to know if Marshall thought he could better help the war effort by going to England for Overlord or by staying in Washington with the Joint Chiefs. Marshall demurred, telling Roosevelt that “personal preferences were of no account in war,” and that whatever the president’s decision it would be “all right.” That constituted one of the most selfless acts of the war and of Marshall’s career as well.3
AS THE WAR PROGRESSED, Marshall relentlessly contended with matters great and small. He was pleased with the way MacArthur was going about his business in the South Pacific but aggravated by his constant sniping at the navy, which Marshall feared would foster noncooperation between the services. MacArthur allowed reporters to hang around his headquarters and did not stoop to scruples in using them for his purposes. Stories would be printed charging that the navy had refused carrier escorts to one of MacArthur’s invasions, or that the navy was more worried about losing ships than winning the war. MacArthur wouldn’t necessarily say these things himself, but had allowed them to “leak” from one of his staff members.
Inevitably the stories would be printed in Honolulu newspapers, setting off Admiral Nimitz with a full head of steam; then Admiral King and others in Washington would receive angry cables and the whole thing would eventually wind up in Marshall’s lap. The chief of staff in turn sent MacArthur everything from polite requests that he refrain from criticizing his fellow service to stern reprimands, but it did no good. The sniping continued throughout the war and what in hell could Marshall do? Relieve MacArthur for talking to the press? MacArthur was a great hero to the American people and, most important, he was winning battles. There were limits to what a chief of staff could do, and first and foremost Marshall was for winning the war.
To make matters worse, MacArthur did not limit his depreciatory complaints to the navy but also often referred in the press to “that bunch in Washington,” usually Marshall and the War Department staff, but it could have included everything and everyone from Congress to the president himself. Supplies and ammunition were short, or defective, MacArthur complained, or the wrong kind was sent. MacArthur used the press as if it were a part of his command.
Despite the enormous pressure of his daily duties, Marshall was not above tackling the kinds of problems that could be handled at lower levels. Early in the war a rumor got back to Washington that U.S. fighter planes in MacArthur’s theater were taking a beating from the lighter and faster Japanese Zeros because the Japanese fighters could get above the American planes to shoot them down. Marshall was always keen on correcting those kinds of issues and dispatched an air force general to New Guinea with instructions to “talk to the individual pilots, and the first thing you tell them is that if there is anything they want done to their planes, I will have it done.”4
In fact, when he first learned of the problem, Marshall had ordered one type of plane in the United States stripped of everything to get its weight down, but it was found that the greatest item of weight that could be safely removed was the armor plate around the cockpit seat. When Marshall’s emissary met with the pilots and gave them the option of removing the armor and weighing similar to the enemy Zero they turned it down. “Their clamor out there,” Marshall said, “boiled down to one thing—they wanted girls. I sent word to the pilots that I was sympathetic, but I couldn’t supply them with girls.”5
There were other headaches. Malaria was a constant issue in the southwestern Pacific, particularly for air corps ground crews who had to work throughout the night on the planes to keep them in flying condition. Toiling under electric lights and without mosquito netting, they were either eaten alive by mosquitos or beginning to turn yellow from “terrible doses of Atabrine” (a malaria preventive, taken as a pill). The pilots were afraid that the mechanics “were so dopey they weren’t certain they were putting in the cotter pins and things of that sort,” Marshall said. When this came to his attention, it was evident to Marshall that these men would have to be relieved first and sent back to recuperate, but the snag was that the staff had not anticipated such problems and were training far too few mechanics and ground service crews as replacements.
The subject of replacements wasn’t of course limited only to mechanics. Marshall always tried to keep his units up to full strength, he said, for morale as well as for fighting purposes. In one instance, fighter pilots flying out of England and other theaters of the war needed to have replacements in a way that kept the mess table always full. “If they fail to come in” (meaning they were shot down), “the [replacement] had to take their place because to sit down and find half the mess table empty was very depressing to the men.”6
PATTON HAD FOR MUCH OF HIS CAREER been a trial to his superiors and his behavior continually aggrieved Marshall—the more so because he knew Patton and liked him. He’d known him in World War I, roomed with him at Fort Myer, sailed with him on the Chesapeake, and written in his little black book that “Patton will take a unit through hell and high water.”
“Give him an armored cor
ps when one becomes available,” he’d added. “But keep a tight rope around his neck.” Marshall thought Patton was one of the finest, brightest tacticians in the army and had great admiration for his ability to whip a body of troops into shape. But slapping an enlisted soldier—and a hospital patient to boot—was outrageous. It appeared to Patton that Eisenhower and Marshall were deliberately letting him wither on the vine, with his Seventh Army being dismantled piece by piece—some units going to Mark Clark’s Fifth Army in Italy, others to England to prepare for Overlord.
In fact, the Allies had concocted various ruses under the code name Operation Fortitude to mislead the Germans about where and when the Overlord invasion would occur, and Patton figured prominently in these schemes. Eisenhower, meanwhile, was content to keep Patton guessing as to what his role in the great invasion, if any, would be.
First, Patton was sent around the Mediterranean areas, including the island of Corsica, ostensibly for ceremonial purposes but the notion was to make the Germans believe his presence signified an Allied invasion somewhere in that region. When Patton was finally called to England in January 1944, Eisenhower told him he was going to command the U.S. Third Army, as yet on its way to England.
Meanwhile, due to his prestigious military reputation among the German High Command, Patton was given the additional assignment of commanding the First Army Group, a purely fictitious entity under Operation Fortitude, designed to fool the Nazis into thinking the Allies were preparing to invade France at the Pas-de-Calais—the shortest distance between England and France—in mid-July 1944. The actual invasion was to take place several hundred miles south, and a month earlier, on the Normandy coast.