Franklin Roosevelt understood MacArthur’s importance as a national icon and his talents as a general, but he didn’t trust him. In 1933, when FDR wanted to cut the army’s budget to divert badly needed federal funds to domestic relief, MacArthur had a fit: “When we lost the next war,” he told the president, “and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat spat out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur but Roosevelt.” MacArthur’s comment infuriated Roosevelt: “You must not talk that way to the president,” he snapped. Refusing MacArthur’s offer to resign, Roosevelt persuaded him to stay. But he considered MacArthur, next to Louisiana senator Huey Long, the most dangerous man to democracy in the country.
For his defense of the Philippines against superior Japanese forces, MacArthur became “a symbol of national defiance.” When he arrived in Australia after a hazardous crossing of 560 miles in PT boats and a nine-hour plane trip from the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, MacArthur uttered the famous remark—“I came through and I will return”—that inspired hope and made him America’s most prominent war hero.
The following month, when Doolittle led an air raid on Tokyo with sixteen B-25 bombers flying from an aircraft carrier some 650 miles from Japan, it gave Americans the feeling that the country was fighting back and would eventually carry the full weight of the war to Japan. The incarceration of some 110,000 Japanese Americans in what Roosevelt called “concentration camps” away from the West Coast, where they were feared as potential saboteurs, also gave Americans a sense of striking at the enemy. It was, however, less an act of national defense than an assault on loyal citizens, which the U.S. Supreme Court later called the greatest breach of American civil liberties in history. The action spoke more to the low state of American morale in early 1942 and the nation’s irrational fear of and racism toward Japanese Americans than to any wise measure of national security.
Symbolic slaps at Japan, however, could not substitute for substantive victories. Consequently, in May and June, when U.S. naval forces repulsed Japanese efforts to seize Port Moresby in New Guinea in the Battle of the Coral Sea and, more decisively, Midway Island, 1,100 miles northwest of Hawaii’s main island of Oahu, it generated realistic hopes that the war was turning in America’s direction. At a minimum, the victories eased fears of Japanese troop landings in Australia and Hawaii.
The victory would take almost four years of savage and costly fighting. Throughout 1943, Japanese resistance in battles for the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, and New Britain convinced U.S. military planners that it might take until 1948 or 1949 to end the war. But at the Quebec conference in August 1943, General Marshall warned that if Germany were defeated in 1944 or 1945, public demoralization would set in if it took an additional three or four years to win in the Pacific.
During 1944, revised plans to end the Far East war within twelve months of Germany’s collapse were made uncertain by fierce opposition to American campaigns in the Central Pacific’s Gilbert, Marshall, and Caroline Islands. The battle for Tarawa, for instance, a narrow strip of land in the Gilberts that became a valuable airfield for future operations, was a particularly bloody fight against three thousand well-entrenched Japanese troops. It was a prelude to the fighting in the Palaus in the western Carolines and, more famously, Iwo Jima, a five-mile-long island halfway between the Marianas and the Japanese home islands. In one of the most costly battles of the Pacific War, more than 6,800 marines lost their lives in overcoming 21,000 Japanese troops, only about 1,100 of whom were taken prisoner. The rest perished in combat or committed suicide. The victory gave U.S. air forces a valuable base from which to raid Japan and a memorable, even if staged, flag-raising on Mount Suribachi that boosted morale among U.S. forces and Americans at home.
The closer American troops got to Japan, the fiercer the combat. In Okinawa between April and June 1945 the Japanese lost more than 107,000 men and what remained of its principal naval vessels; but it was at the cost of some 12,000 U.S. seamen and ground troops, with almost 32,000 wounded, 30 U.S. ships sunk, and another 368 damaged.
Japanese determination to fight to the last man, and to sacrifice their lives for their emperor rather than face defeat, convinced Americans that total victory was the only reasonable way to deal with so fanatical an enemy. Suicidal banzai charges in several of the early island battles and, beginning in 1944, kamikaze pilots flying their planes into U.S. ships, coupled with stories of Japanese atrocities against captured troops and subject populations, made Americans all too ready to see the Japanese as subhuman. By contrast, the Japanese thought of themselves as representing a “pure spirit” turning back a “demonic onslaught.”
The Japanese government encouraged all 73 million citizens of the home islands to think of themselves as part of the kamikazes, or Japan’s “Special Attack Force,” as they described units on suicide missions. Japanese civilians were encouraged to believe that they had no choice: government propaganda described Anglo-American intentions dating from the nineteenth century as hegemony in Asia. Japan’s war was a “counteroffensive of the Oriental races against Occidental aggression” or a conflict to prevent the West from turning Japan into a “slave state.” One Japanese writer later described this appeal as “the mesmerizing grandeur of massive destruction.”
To Americans, the quintessential “Jap” was Hideki Tojo, the country’s prime minister. In a Life magazine photo article titled “How to Tell Japs from Chinese,” Tojo was described as “a ‘typical’ Japanese, whose squat long-torsoed build, massively boned head, flat pug nose, and yellow ocher skin ‘betrays aboriginal antecedents.’”
It was not Tojo’s physical appearance, however, that made him an object of contempt or put him at the center of public animus in the United States. He was considered a principal war criminal: as a commanding general in China between 1935 and 1938, the architect of Japan’s aggression; as minister of war in 1940–41, a proponent of the Axis alliance with Germany and Italy; and as prime minister beginning in October 1941, the man most responsible for Pearl Harbor. For almost three years he had directed Japan’s war efforts, the official most responsible for Japanese aggression and atrocities. Despite his resignation after Japan’s defeat in Saipan in the Marianas in June 1944, which convinced many Japanese that the war effort was doomed, Americans continued to see Tojo as the leading villain in the Pacific War. In September 1945, he was identified as one of forty Japanese war criminals. A failed suicide attempt seemed to confirm his guilt; he was convicted of “conspiracy, waging an aggressive war, and ordering, authorizing, and permitting atrocities,” and was executed in December 1948.
The vicious Pacific fighting and the conviction that the Japanese would rather die than surrender gave license to American military chiefs to adopt extreme measures of destruction against Japanese combatants and civilians alike. In 1944 the B-29 Superfortress, the largest World War II bomber, which could carry a four-ton bomb load and travel 3,500 miles on a round trip, became available, and devastating incendiary raids on Japanese cities began. In March 1945, 334 B-29s hit Tokyo in a raid that killed more than 83,000 residents by incineration, injured another 40,000, and destroyed about a quarter of the city. The heat from the firebombing boiled the water in canals, and people who ran into the water to escape the flames were boiled alive or asphyxiated by the veil of smoke that surrounded them. The fire consumed everything it touched; wooden structures fueled the flames, and the metal in buildings and bridges melted.
By June, Japan’s six leading industrial centers lay in ruins. By the end of the fighting, sixty-six major cities had suffered immobilizing damage. Forty percent of Japan’s urban areas had been destroyed, with 30 percent of their populations homeless; in Tokyo, 65 percent of all homes were reduced to rubble. Of the nearly 400,000 Japanese civilians killed in air raids, a majority of them lost their lives in the incendiary raids.
Although U.S. military planners had made plans to burn up Japan’s combustible
cities even before Pearl Harbor, the implementation of such a strategy awaited the development of the B-29 and the leadership of Major General Curtis LeMay, who saw the Superfortresses and firebombings as a formula for a quicker end to the war without a costly invasion of Japan.
LeMay pioneered the tactic of low-level nighttime attacks, more effective than daytime high-altitude precision bombing, which could not pinpoint war-making factories scattered in civilian districts of the cities as well as in remote parts of the country. To ease consciences over attacking civilians, American planes dropped leaflets prior to raids, warning civilians to leave the cities that were designated targets. Nevertheless, the Japanese saw air raids on defenseless civilians as inexcusable, and so had no qualms about summarily executing captured B-29 crews. Nor would they have hesitated to execute LeMay as a war criminal had they won the war. LeMay himself acknowledged this likelihood and justified the raids by describing them as a necessity that seemed likely to shorten the war and save both American and Japanese lives.
Among the many frustrations in the prolonged war against Japan was the unreliability of China. For both military and domestic political purposes, Roosevelt felt compelled to identify China as one of the Big Four, giving Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government standing on a par with Britain, Russia, and the United States. China’s history as a victim of Japanese aggression and earlier imperialism gave China a special appeal to Americans as their favorite wartime ally. American missionaries, aided by Henry Luce, the publisher of Life and Time magazines and the son of missionaries in China, where he was born, promoted an idealized picture of China’s government under Chiang Kai-shek, a Christian who gave validation to the century-long work of America’s missionaries. The missionary propaganda and the view of China as a victim of Fascist aggression convinced Americans that China should play a major role in the postwar world equal to that of Great Britain and the Soviet Union.
Yet the reality of a poor country divided by civil strife between Chiang Kai-shek’s ruling Nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s opposition Communists limited China’s contribution to the war effort and potential postwar influence. Moreover, Chiang’s determination to rely on the United States to fight Japan and preserve his government’s military capacity against the day when he expected to fight Communist insurgents made China a secondary battleground against Japan.
When Churchill visited Washington in January 1942, he marveled at what he saw as American naivete about China. He later complained that he “found the extraordinary significance of China in American minds, even at the top, strangely out of proportion.” Americans seemed to consider China’s armies the equal of British and Soviet fighting forces. “If I can epitomize in one word the lesson I learned in the United States,” he told his commanding general in the Far East, “it was ‘China.’”
Nevertheless, Roosevelt believed that so large a country with such untapped resources and a population of a half billion people could not be consigned to a minor role in world affairs. His objective was to encourage perceptions, whatever the reality, of a great nation contributing to the defeat of Japan and the shape of postwar Asia. In February 1942 he appointed General Joseph W. Stilwell commander of U.S. Army forces in China, Burma, and India (CBI) and as chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek, who was named supreme commander of all forces in the CBI area. The title reflected not expectations of China’s direct military contribution to the war but a desire to raise Chiang’s public standing, encourage the Chinese to keep fighting, and compel Japan to maintain a large force in China.
In February 1942, after Stilwell met with Roosevelt to discuss his assignment, he expressed in a characteristically blunt diary entry what he thought of the president and his mission in China. He described Roosevelt during a twenty-minute meeting as “very pleasant and very unimpressive. As if I were a constituent in to see him. [The president] rambled on about his idea of the war.” It was “just a lot of wind. After I had enough, I broke in and asked him if he had a message for Chiang Kai-shek. He very obviously had not and talked for five minutes and hunted around for something world-shaking to say.” Finally, he asked Stilwell to tell the generalissimo that “we are in this thing for keeps, and we intended to keep at it until China gets back all her lost territory.” He wanted Stilwell to discourage Mme Chiang Kai-shek from making a planned visit to the United States.
Roosevelt’s unstated message was: I’m sending you on something of a fool’s errand. Yes, we want China to keep fighting, but we have no intention of making CBI a principal war theater alongside Europe. So, let’s jolly Chiang along with just enough matériel to keep his armies fighting, and let’s keep his wife away from Washington, where she could generate political pressure for greater help than a wise strategy dictates. In June 1942, Roosevelt told his ambassador in London that he hoped to keep the Chinese happy and fighting by “telling stories and doing most of the talking.” Chiang was willing to accommodate Roosevelt and the Americans as long as they met his self-serving approach to the war: “Americans are expected to go on carrying the load in the air, bringing in supplies, and building up a force that will make China safe for the Kuomintawo [Chiang’s Nationalists],” Stilwell observed.
If Roosevelt had any doubts about the accuracy of Stilwell’s analysis, a visit to Washington by Mme Chiang in the winter of 1943 dispelled them. A Wellesley graduate with an excellent command of English and an understanding of American sympathy for her country, which she exploited to the fullest, Mme Chiang irritated Roosevelt to no end during a stay at the White House. During a press conference with the president, when he told reporters that the United States would send supplies to China just as fast as the good Lord would allow, she embarrassed him by responding, “Mr. President, I understand that you have a saying in your country that the Lord helps those who help themselves.” In a speech before a joint congressional session, she made such a strong impression that the military chiefs worried that her appeal for greater help to China might undermine their Europe-first strategy. Roosevelt confided to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau that he was “just crazy to get her out of the country.”
The president told Eleanor Roosevelt that despite impressions of a delicate sophisticated lady who wore stylish black silk dresses with a slit up the side and smoked British cigarettes, Mme Chiang was “as hard as steel.” He did not think that she was the sort of leader “who was guiding her country toward a democratic future.”
Stilwell deepened the president’s impressions of a corrupt, repressive, but ineffective Chinese government. “Anything that is done in China,” he told the war department, “will be done in spite of, and not because of, the Peanut [Stilwell’s derogatory name for Chiang] and his military clique.” Stilwell advised Marshall that the Chinese army “is generally in desperate condition, underfed, unpaid, untrained, neglected, and rotten with corruption. We can pull them out of this cesspool, but continued concessions have made the Generalissimo believe he has only to insist and we will yield.”
Despite his understanding that Chiang’s regime was anything but democratic and receptive to reform, either in his government or his army, Roosevelt refused to come down hard on him. He believed that Chiang’s problems in trying to control a country that was so poor and divided were beyond anything American pressure could change. He told Marshall that Stillwell’s gruff approach to Chiang was the wrong way to go about dealing with him: “One cannot speak sternly to a man like that or exact commitments from him the way we might do from the Sultan of Morocco.”
Roosevelt feared that excessive demands on Chiang might lead to a collapse of his government and its war effort, however limited. Tokyo’s need to keep a large force in China limited its capacity to fight U.S. troops in the Pacific Island campaigns. Roosevelt hoped that China would eventually become a prime base of operations against Japan: airfields from which American planes could readily reach Japan in 1942–43 could be invaluable in forcing an early Japanese surrender, but only if Chinese armies protected the bases from Japanes
e attacks. Roosevelt also believed that China’s collapse would play havoc with his postwar vision of a cooperative China helping police East Asia and the Pacific. A stable China might also become a counterweight to Russia in the Far East, where Roosevelt saw the possibility of postwar great power tensions.
By 1944–45, however, Roosevelt understood that Japan’s defeat would have to be the result of island conquests in the Pacific leading to a possible direct invasion of her home islands. But he continued to fear a Chinese collapse that could burden American forces with having to overcome Japanese armies in China. His eagerness to assure Soviet entry into the war against Japan rested on the hope that Soviet troops could tie down Japanese forces in Manchuria and help compel a Japanese surrender in China after a successful invasion of Japan. Roosevelt also feared that a Chinese collapse would discourage American participation in postwar international affairs.
Because he found it increasingly unlikely that he could force Chiang into military or political actions that served U.S. purposes, Roosevelt tried to solve his China problems by working out an accommodation with Stalin. At Yalta, Stalin made clear that he wanted the transfer of southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands from Japan to Russia, access to a warm-water port—Darien on the Kwantung Peninsula—and use of Manchurian railways. Roosevelt said he favored the Soviet demands but could not speak for Chiang. In return, Stalin promised to enter the war against Japan within three months of Germany’s collapse and to support a Nationalist-Communist coalition government.