Now MacArthur had his mandate. All ships, planes, and Allied troops in his part of the Pacific belonged to him, and no other commander on either side of the war would be more jealous of his prerogatives. To protect them he was prepared to tilt with any other leader, including, on several occasions, Winston Churchill. Churchill had reluctantly agreed to send home the three Australian divisions fighting in the Middle East. While they were crossing the Indian Ocean he had second thoughts, however, and he seriously considered diverting two of them to Burma. MacArthur protested vigorously. The prime minister explained to Roosevelt that his intelligence officers were convinced that the Japanese were going to halt their drive on Australia and invade India instead. The President forwarded this appreciation to Melbourne without comment. The General shot back that his intelligence had reached the opposite conclusion, and a new enemy offensive in New Guinea vindicated him. Later MacArthur cabled Washington that he feared that Mountbatten, fighting in Burma, might encroach on his preserve. Roosevelt sent this message, again without comment, to Chequers, the prime minister’s country estate. David Wallace, a British diplomat, was visiting Churchill at the time. His host crossed the room to an enormous globe, equipped with a glass measuring device. He carefully calculated the distance between Burma and Australia, and then looked up. “Sixty-six hundred and sixty miles,” he said to Wallace. He added wryly, “Do you think that’s far enough apart?”12
On that count the General’s suspicions were absurd, and his hypersensitivity here and elsewhere became a joke at the Pentagon, where officers agreed that of all theater commanders, he had the worst case of “localitis. ‘ But it is certainly true that he was treated more stingily than the others. In 1942 the Joint Chiefs gave him staggering goals—the capture of the Bismarck Archipelago and of Rabaul, the mighty Japanese base on New Britain, defended by 100,000 enemy troops—and he was provided with very little with which to reach them. Never was the Southwest Pacific allocated as much as 15 percent of the American war effort. When Eisenhower invaded North Africa, he was provided with fifteen tons of supplies per man. MacArthur, who commanded just 12 percent of the GIs sent abroad, received five tons per man. To be sure, “Torch,” the North African campaign, and “Bolero,” the buildup for Normandy, deserved precedence. But even in the Pacific, Nimitz was provided with more sinews of war than MacArthur. Moreover, the State Department’s Radio News Bulletin No. 239 would reveal that during the first year of Allied campaigning in Italy, American provisions shipped to needy Italian civilians—2,300,000 long tons—were roughly equivalent to all U.S. shipments to MacArthur that year. The State Department was proud of this humanitarianism, but the broadcast was bitterly received in the Southwest Pacific.13
At times the General despaired. He was, he told his staff, the victim of “shoestring logistics.” To Robert E, Wood he wrote that his supply situation “leaves much to be desired.” He wrote George Van Horn Moseley that “out here I am busy doing what I can with what I have, but resources have never been made available to me for a real stroke. Innumerable openings present themselves which because of the weakness of my forces I cannot seize. It is truly an Area of Lost Opportunity.” To another officer, George B. Duncan, he wrote that “from the beginning we have had a hard time. No resources and no supplies made the situation precarious from the start. I have done the best I could with what I had, but no commander in American history has so failed of support as here.” He unfairly blamed the Joint Chiefs when, in fact, they sympathized with him. In June 1942, irked by the insistence of British commanders that all materiel be channeled to Europe and the Middle East, they threatened to reverse priorities and let Hitler wait until Japan had been defeated. The British thought the Americans were bluffing, “but it is my impression,” wrote Robert Sherwood, who sat in on these heated Anglo-American talks, “that the plan was far more than a bluff in General Marshall’s mind and certainly in Admiral King’s. Indeed, the first step in it—the assault on Guadalcanal—was approved on June 25, the last day of Churchill’s short stay in Washington. One may indulge in some pretty wild speculation as to the consequences had the plan been followed through—including the thought that the first atomic bomb might have fallen on Berlin instead of Hiroshima. ”14
Roosevelt would have had the final say in so major a strategic shift, of course, and there was never any doubt that he intended to abide by Rainbow Five, defeating the Nazis before turning westward to Japan. On May 6 he had written MacArthur that while he understood the General’s frustration, marshaling armies powerful enough to open a second front in Europe must come first. The President added: “I know that you will feel the effect of all this . . . I well realize your difficult problems, and that you have to be an ambassador as well as a supreme commander.” This was a delicate reference to the political situation in Canberra. As Sherwood noted, one of Roosevelt’s reasons for ordering the General there was that he was disturbed about the morale down under. It was a peculiarity of Australia’s geographical position that the continent was strategically important to no one except the Australians. As a high-ranking Australian officer told Clark Lee, “Australia, like the Philippines, is expendable in terms of global strategy.” MacArthur’s presence was meant to assure the people there that they would not be abandoned. At the time of his appointment, both Roosevelt and London assumed that he would remain on the strategic defensive. It was MacArthur’s determination to recapture the Philippines which would alter the course of the Pacific war.15
Since becoming prime minister the previous fall, John Curtin had openly criticized Whitehall for neglecting Australia’s defenses. In the past, whenever his constituents had been discontented with their status as part of the British Empire, London had reminded them that their safety was guaranteed by the mighty British fleet. Now that those warships were desperately needed down under, they were too busy elsewhere to come. Like other subjects of the empire, generation after generation of Australians had consoled themselves with the maxim that England always loses every battle in a war except the last one. In the spring of 1942 they suddenly realized that the final battle was imminent, and their hopes of survival depended upon, not the British, but the Americans. Thus MacArthur’s support in Canberra was all-party. Without a dissenting voice, the government abolished its Military Board and vested the board’s powers in the General. Australian troops called him “Choco Doug”—“Choco” being digger slang for chocolate soldier—but unlike the GIs’ “Dugout Doug,” it was an affectionate nickname. His popularity among the Australians never wavered. All his requests were approved by the Canberra government, and as long as he stayed in the Menzies Hotel, worshipful crowds of spectators gathered across the street every day at his time of departure for Collins Street, some just to admire his thirteen rows of ribbons. Even his rejection of Roosevelt’s suggestion that Australian and Dutch soldiers be appointed to his staff—all but three of the officers around him were members of the Bataan Gang—did not diminish his popularity.16
That April the Canberra parliament broke a precedent by voting him the privileges of its floor. “You’ll enjoy this, Doug!” a working-class M.P. shouted at him as he entered. The General glared—since his mother’s death no one had called him that—but he clearly relished his role as envoy. He was under the mistaken impression that Curtin was responsible for his new command, an error that the prime minister apparently encouraged, and the two men grew to be very close, despite the fact that Curtin’s politics were far to the left of the General’s, and, in fact, of Franklin Roosevelt’s. The first time they met, on March 26, MacArthur put his hand on Curtin’s shoulder and said, “Mr. Prime Minister, you and I will see this thing through together.” Later he told newspapermen that Curtin was “the heart and soul of Australia.” Because of his involvement in Australian politics, he would repeatedly revisit the country to consult with politicians down under long after the enemy threat to the nation had been parried. Before Manuel Quezon sailed from Melbourne to the United States, where he would establish his govern
ment-in-exile, he asked the General: “Tell me the frank truth. Can you liberate my country and free my people?” MacArthur swiftly replied: “I intend to do just that. And when I stand at the gates of Manila, I want the President of the Commonwealth at my right hand and the Prime Minister of Australia at my left. ”17
MacArthur attends the Australian Parliament, May 1942
As it turned out, both Quezon and Curtin would be dead before the war’s end, but his ranking of the Australian as high in his affection as the Filipino indicates how swiftly his friendship with the prime minister had grown. Perhaps it also suggests that his new friend represented his hopes for the future, while the tubercular Quezon represented past defeat. The General would never forget his beating on Luzon. Switchboard operators at his headquarters were instructed to greet incoming calls with a terse, “Hello, this is Bataan,” and when Jean christened Australia’s newest destroyer it was named, at her husband’s request, H.M.S. Bataan. But he would have been inhuman if he hadn’t recoiled from the memory of those terrible hundred days after Pearl Harbor. It took time. In the beginning, before the scar tissue could form, his wounded pride was evident to everyone around him. One correspondent recalls that “MacArthur in person was hard to get along with in those early Australian days. He was short, sharp, and frequently insulting to those he felt had failed him in the Philippines, showing especially his contempt for the Navy and Air Force.” Brett, who had not yet been relieved and who felt the full force of his wrath, thought MacArthur was “suffering a feeling of guilt in having left his men at the most critical moment of their hopeless fight. ‘ The General yearned for some way to strike back at the conquerors of the Philippines. On March 29 Sutherland walked into Brett’s office and told him that MacArthur wanted a bombing mission dispatched to the islands at once. Brett protested; the Philippines was lost, he said, and sending his planes that far north would needlessly risk the lives of the fliers. Sutherland said sharply, “General MacArthur promised the Filipino people he would be back. If we send a bombing mission it will prove they have not been forgotten.” Fuming, the airman put up all he had, which wasn’t much—ten B-25s and three B-17s. They all returned, but that was the last raid until the Philippines was about to be liberated, and its results were negligible.18
One of the last men to escape from Bataan was Carlos Romulo, and when he walked into MacArthur’s Melbourne headquarters on April 25, unshaven, in an outsize uniform, and twenty-nine pounds lighter than his weight when last they met, the General embraced him, saying brokenly, “Carlos, my boy! I can’t bear to look at you!” The news Romulo brought was even less bearable. Surrender of Corregidor was imminent. The Fil-American troops, stunned by MacArthur’s breakout to Australia, believed Radio Tokyo’s propaganda broadcasts that the General had become “a nervous wreck.” Rations were completely exhausted. In the tunnel, Wainwright, who was resigned to his fate, had told Romulo: “Tell Quezon and MacArthur we have done our best.” The General instantly radioed Corregidor that he was “utterly opposed under any circumstances or conditions to the ultimate capitulation of this command” and that Wainwright should “prepare and execute an attack upon the enemy” before starvation destroyed any possibility of a vigorous drive. Reporting the ration situation to George Marshall, he cabled savagely: IT IS OF COURSE POSSIBLE THAT WITH MY DEPARTURE THE VIGOR OF APPLICATION OF CONSERVATION MAY HAVE BEEN RELAXED.19
That was shabby of MacArthur, unjust to the brave men he had left, and wholly unsuccessful in altering the outcome of the Philippine campaign. On April 8 Bataan had fallen. Quezon, who was packing for a voyage to California on the President Coolidge, said the debacle “closes a chapter in the history of the Filipino people for freedom as heroic, if not the most heroic, that we have ever fought.” MacArthur uncapped his fountain pen and wrote: “The Bataan force went out as it would have wished, fighting to the end [of] its flickering forlorn hope. No army has ever done so much with so little and nothing became it more than its last hour of trial and agony. To the weeping Mothers of its dead, I can only say that the sacrifice and halo of Jesus of Nazareth has [sic] descended upon their sons, and that God will take them unto himself.”20
Mark Watson wrote in the Saturday Review that MacArthur was “sure the prolonged defense of Bataan upset Japan’s timetable and saved Australia. So are the Australians.” George Kenney thought it likely: “How much the extra effort expended by the Japanese in the Philippines detracted from carrying out their original plan to seize New Caledonia and Fiji, thus cutting our route to Australia, is difficult to estimate, but certainly if that had happened there would have been no Battle of the Coral Sea, Port Moresby would probably have fallen, and the Japs would then have been able to carry out the next phase of their plan, which was an invasion of Australia itself.”
As the rising sun’s blinding rays penetrated the jungles of Oceania, creeping ever closer to Australia, MacArthur drove himself mercilessly. Time was his enemy, and in his struggle with it he was encumbered by countless duties which went with his unique position in Melbourne. “A general today,” wrote Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “must be a diplomat, a politician, an industrial statesman, a transportation czar, a publicity expert—all these things as well as a strategist and a tactician.” MacArthur had to confer with the American Lend-Lease administrator in Canberra, requisition British ammunition for Australian weapons, approve plans for a powerful new class of Australian warships, and advise Curtin’s Department of Aircraft Production on what kind of military equipment local industrialists should manufacture. Though he detested appearances before civilian crowds, he repeatedly joined the prime minister in appealing for support of war-bond drives, and twice he contributed large sums of money himself.21
If playing all these roles was essential, some of MacArthur’s Australian activities are harder to justify. Much of his correspondence can only be described as weird. Thousands of American individuals and organizations discovered that his address was APO 500, Australia. Each day he received between 100 and 150 letters from them, and while he couldn’t reply to all, he did answer a great many, sometimes at length. At a time when he could catch only a few hours of sleep each night, he calmed the anxiety of a ten-year-old boy in Utica, New York, whose schoolmates had told him that Hawaii had been captured; the General assured him that “the Japs have not ‘got’ Pearl Harbor and are not going to get it.” Children who asked for autographs got them. In his tall, angular handwriting he sent messages to such groups as the Brooklyn Red Cross Blood Bank, the National Association of Manufacturers, the AFL, the CIO, the University of Wisconsin, the I. J. Fox Doughboy Committee, the Elks of Jersey City, the Christ Episcopal Church of Little Rock, Arkansas (“At the altar where I first joined the sanctuary of God, I ask that you seek divine guidance for me in the great struggle that lies ahead”), the Indian tribes of the Southwest, who chose him their “Chief of Chiefs” and sent him a warbonnet (“I would not swap it for any medal or decoration I have ever received. They were my oldest friends, the companions of my boyhood days on the Western frontier”*), and the National Father’s Day Committee of Alvin, Texas.22
The latter led to bizarre consequences. The committee named him 1942s “Father of the Year.” That week Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura’s Seventeenth and Eighteenth armies were descending the green ladders of New Guinea and the Solomons. Soon they would be within bomber range of Brisbane. MacArthur’s ill-trained Australian militia was drilling with wooden guns. Under these circumstances, one would think, the committee might expect, at most, a brief acknowledgment from a member of the General’s staff. Instead, it received this holograph: “Nothing has touched me more deeply than the act of the National Father’s Day Committee. By profession I am a soldier and take great pride in that fact, but I am prouder, infinitely prouder, to be a father. A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys. The one has the potentialities of death; the other embodies creation and life. And while the hordes of death are mighty, the battal
ions of life are mightier still. It is my hope that my son when I am gone will remember me, not from the battle, but in the home, repeating with him our simple daily prayer, ‘Our Father Who art in Heaven.’ “ As so often in his life, his yearning for love expressed itself as bathos, and was greeted, among those whose good opinion he courted, with ridicule.23
Later they would remember his mawkishness and forget his military genius, but in those dark years his battle skills won the respect of all Americans, including liberals and intellectuals. The base for his later campaigns against the Japanese was being built up at a frantic pace during those early months of 1942. Substantial reinforcements were arriving every day. Brigades of Australian infantry divisions, veterans of North Africa, Greece, and Crete, swung off gangplanks and began jungle training. They lacked service troops, water transport, and air units, but ships bearing these were on their way. On April 6 the U.S. 41st Division docked at Port Adelaide, and nine days later it was followed by the U.S. 32nd Division. MacArthur now had enough troops to make a stand against Imamura, provided he was willing to strip the rest of the continent’s defenses and send his soldiers in without reserves. He had already decided to do that; in fact, he had little choice. His most urgent need now was for fighters and bombers. On paper his air arm had grown to 517 U.S. airplanes and 250 planes of the Royal Australian Air Force. Most of these were being salvaged or overhauled, however. His real air strength was 220 combat aircraft of all types. Of his 62 Flying Fortresses, only 6 were in shape to take off. When the marines on Guadalcanal appealed to him for 6 P-38S, he would have to decline. They would be resentful, but he could not spare a single plane.24