On April 15, 1943, Halsey flew to Brisbane for three days of talks with the Supreme Commander. He particularly wanted MacArthur’s approval for an invasion of New Georgia, which could then become the springboard for a bound into Bougainville. The General instantly agreed; he had already drawn up plans for just such a drive. Halsey’s gruff, audacious manner delighted him. Clapping him on the back, he told him, “If you come with me, I’ll make you a greater man than Nelson ever dreamed of being.” Later he would write of Halsey in his Reminiscences: “He was of the same aggressive type as John Paul Jones, David Farragut, and George Dewey. His one thought was to close with the enemy and fight him to the death. The bugaboo of many sailors, the fear of losing ships, was completely alien to his conception of sea action.” Halsey, for his part, would recall in his own memoirs: “Five minutes after I reported, I felt as if we were lifelong friends. I have seldom seen a man who makes a quicker, stronger, more favorable impression.” He thought the theaters chain of command was “sensible and satisfactory,” and he was delighted to be a part of it, even in a subordinate role.117
In the last days of June, MacArthur unleashed three blows: Halsey’s invasion of New Georgia by marines, Krueger’s occupation of Kiriwina and Woodlark islands northeast of Papua by GIs, and a landing at New Guinea’s Nassau Bay, just south of Salamaua, by Australians under their own commander, Edmund F. Herring. Early in September he landed a division on Huon Peninsula and followed it up the next day with the first Allied airborne assault in the Pacific by a U.S. parachute regiment, on an abandoned airstrip at Nadzab, northeast of Lae. Kiriwina and Woodlark had given Kenney landing fields from which he could wallop Rabaul with short-range fighters flying top cover; now he wanted airports on the peninsula, unmenaced by nearby Japanese troop concentrations, to sock the great enemy base with crisscrossing Fortress and Liberator (B-24) raids from both south and west.118
In Port Moresby, on the evening before the Nadzab drop, Kenney told the General that he had decided to accompany the paratroopers. “They’re my kids,” he said, “and I want to see them do their stuff.” After a thoughtful pause MacArthur said, “You’re right, George. We’ll both go. They’re my kids, too.” The airman, taken aback, argued that it was foolish for the commander in chief to risk “having some five-dollar-a-month Jap aviator shoot a hole through you. “ MacArthur shook his head. He said, “I’m not worried about getting shot. Honestly, the only thing that disturbs me is the possibility that when we hit the rough air over the mountains my stomach might get upset. I’d hate to throw up and disgrace myself in front of the kids.” It would be the first taste of combat for these parachutists, he said, and he wanted to “give them such comfort as my presence might mean to them.” As the men fell in to board the planes, he “walked along the line,” Kenney later recalled, “stopping occasionally to chat with some of them and wish them luck. They all seemed glad to see him and somehow had found out that he would be watching the jump.’ “ He flew in the lead B-17. Not only didn’t he throw up; when one of his Fortress’s engines broke down, he shook off the pilot’s suggestion that they turn back. “Carry on,” he said. “I’ve been with General Kenney when one engine quit and I know the B-17 flies almost as well on three engines as on four.” After the regiment had hit the silk, he returned to his headquarters and wired Jean at Lennon’s: “It was a honey.”119
His men took Salamaua on September 12 and Lae four days later. Finschhafen, on the tip of the Huon Peninsula, fell on the second, day of October, giving the General a firm base from which to attack New Britain, now just across the straits. Meanwhile the diggers who had wrested Wau from the enemy were moving along inland jungle trails toward Madang, a New Guinea port 160 miles northwest of Lae, and flights of over a hundred American bombers were hammering the Japanese Eighteenth Army headquarters at Wewak, two hundred miles west of Lae, destroying Japanese fighters and bombers there on the ground. In Washington, Pershing told the press: “It is not often given to a commander to achieve the ideal of every general—the surrounding and annihilating of his enemy. But MacArthur, with greatly inferior forces, has achieved this three times in the last eighteen months: In the Kokoda and Milne Bay campaign, in the Bismarck Sea, and now in the operations round Lae and Salamaua.”120
MacArthur supervising paratroop drop, September 1943
MacArthur in the Admiralty Islands, February 1944
Now that he was nearly halfway along New Guinea’s long northern coast, the Philippines was coming ever closer. So was Rabaul. Halsey was moving again, and MacArthur was picking up momentum; in November Krueger landed at Arawe, a village on New Britain’s southwest coast. The Allies had now reached Rabaul’s island, and Japanese columns, hurrying to throw the Americans into the sea, converged on Arawe. That was precisely what MacArthur meant them to do. Krueger’s move was another diversion. On the day after Christmas, when the enemy was fully committed to counterattacking that beachhead, the General put the 1st Marine Division on the New Britain coast at Cape Gloucester.* Four weeks later they seized the airfield there. Now the enemy was bracketed. Bombers from both Bougainville and Gloucester were pounding Rabaul from dawn to twilight, demolishing its installations and cutting its supply lines. The enemy’s proudest bastion in the Southwest Pacific was rapidly being transformed from an asset into a liability. Already Japanese ships and planes were being moved from there to Truk in the Caroline Islands. After MacArthur took Talasea, halfway between Cape Gloucester and Rabaul, Hirohito’s 100,000 infantrymen in Rabaul began digging fresh trenches and donning their thousand-stitch belts, vowing that they would fight to the last man when the Americans came.122
The Americans never came. They never came. Month after month the embattled garrison awaited a blow in vain. Word reached its men of tremendous battles elsewhere—marines were storming ashore in the Gilberts, the Marshalls, and the Marianas, and MacArthur’s drives elsewhere were accelerating as his amphibious operations succeeded one another with breathtaking speed—but no ships were sighted off Rabaul. The emperor’s infantrymen soured, embittered by their unrequited hostility. By early 1944 even the B-17s and B-24s stopped raiding them. Truk was being devastated by Nimitz’s carrier planes, but the sky over Rabaul was serene, and sentinels posted to sound the alarm when Allied patrols approached overland from Cape Gloucester and Arawe stared out at a mocking green silence. All they wanted was an opportunity to sell their lives dearly before they were killed or eviscerated themselves in honorable seppuku. They believed that they were entitled to a Nipponese gotterdammerung, and MacArthur was denying them it, and they were experiencing a kind of psychological hernia.123.
Their officers’ war diaries leave the impression that they felt themselves the victims of a monstrous injustice. Here they were, commanding an army larger than Napoleon’s at Waterloo or Lee’s at Gettysburg—or Wellington’s or Meade’s, for that matter—which was spoiling for a fight. Their sappers had thrown up ramparts, revetments, parapets, barbicans, and ravelins. Hull-down tanks were in position. Mines had been laid, Hotchkiss-type guns sited, Nambus cunningly camouflaged. Mortarmen had calculated precise ranges. Crack troops, designated to launch counterattacks, lurked in huge bunkers behind concertinas of barbwire. And there they remained, in an agony of frustration, for the rest of the war. Their loss of face was incalculable, and when they finally received Hirohito’s imperial rescript, ordering them to surrender, many of them, unable to bear the humiliation, faded into New Britain’s rain forests to live out the rest of their wretched days as tropical animals. The Japanese equivalent of “It never rains but it pours” is “When crying, stung by bee.” Never in the empire’s long martial history—Dai Nippon hadn’t lost a war since 1598—had so many warriors been tormented by such a hive.
This phenomenon was not confined to Rabaul, but Rabaul is the most dramatic illustration of what happened to the enemy legions MacArthur bypassed. Exactly who first suggested the stratagem is unclear. He himself has been widely credited with it, largely on the basis of his own recoll
ections and those of the men around him. In Reminiscences he writes:
To push back the Japanese perimeter of conquest by direct pressure against the mass of enemy-occupied islands would be a long and costly effort. My staff worried about Rabaul and other strongpoints . . . . I intended to envelop them, incapacitate them, apply the “hit em where they ain’t—let em die on the vine” philosophy. I explained that this was the very opposite of what was termed “island-hopping,” which is the gradual pushing back of the enemy by direct frontal pressure, with the consequent heavy casualties which would certainly be involved. There would be no need for storming the mass of islands held by the enemy. “Island-hopping,” I said, “with extravagant losses and slow progress, is not my idea of how to end the war as soon and as cheaply as possible. New conditions and new weapons require new and imaginative methods for solution and application. Wars are never won in the past.”
Japan, he told a Collier’s writer in 1950, “failed to see the new concept of war which was used against her, involving the by-passing of strongly defended points and, by the use of the combined services, the cutting of essential lines of communication, whereby these defensive positions were rendered strategically useless and eventually retaken.”124
He not only advanced this line of reasoning after the war; he had said pretty much the same thing during the fighting. If he followed the Buna precedent, he told Sid Huff, it might take him a decade to reconquer the Philippines and reach Tokyo, and at about the same time a New York Times reporter quoted him as saying: “If you force the Japs into a corner, they’ll fight viciously to the death. They can live a long time on a little rice and few supplies. Flank them, give them a line of retreat even though it may lead nowhere, and you have them.” According to Huff, Willoughby, and Kenney, the General first unveiled this concept at a council of war attended by, among others, Halsey, Krueger, and Australia’s Sir Thomas Blarney. Gesturing at the map, one of the conferees said, “I don’t see how we can take these strongpoints with our limited forces.” Tapping his cigarette on an ashtray, MacArthur said in a slow, deliberate voice: “Well, let’s just say that we don’t take them. In fact, gentlemen, I don’t want them.” Turning to Kenney he said: “You incapacitate them.” Later, pacing the Moresby veranda with long, swinging strides, he told the airman: “Starve Rabaul! The jungle! Starvation! They’re my allies.”125
The fact that such performances convinced as astute a man as Kenney is evidence of the General’s extraordinary theatrical gifts, for the truth was not that simple. As MacArthur himself observed in later years, “leapfrogging”—his name for it—“was actually the adaptation of modern instrumentalities of war to a concept as ancient as war itself . . . the classic strategy of envelopment.” The first leapfroggers in the Pacific had been the Japanese, who had bypassed Luzon and then encircled Java before taking it. Americans had then more or less stumbled on this emasculating tactic in the Aleutians. The enemy held Kiska and Attu. Kiska was the island closer to the United States, but it was also more heavily fortified. On May 11, 1943, a U.S. division recaptured Attu, and when they turned to Kiska they discovered that the Japanese had evacuated it. Then Halsey, holding tactical command under MacArthur’s strategic supervision, became bogged down in the swamps of New Georgia. Both he and the General began to have long second thoughts about the wisdom of a step-by-step offensive. They realized that it gave the Japanese time to strengthen their defenses and failed to capitalize on U.S. air and naval superiority. The next island up on the Solomons chain was Kolombangara, bristling with 10,000 Japanese. The admiral bounded over them and seized Vella Lavella, garrisoned by only 250 troops. Kolombangara, like Kiska, was then evacuated by the enemy.126
Halsey had acted with the General’s approval, but the notion that the isolation of Rabaul was the General’s inspiration just won’t wash. Apparently the first references to the possibility of such a bypass were made in March of 1943, during Washington talks which were attended by Sutherland, Kenney, and Stephen J. Chamberlin, the General’s operations officer. If they mentioned it to MacArthur on their return, he was unimpressed. Eight months earlier the Joint Chiefs had instructed him to take Rabaul and Kavieng. He hadn’t protested then, and he didn’t now. Indeed, when the Chiefs sounded him out in June, informing him that some Pentagon officers thought that Rabaul could be cut off and left to rot, he objected. He needed “an adequate forward naval base” there, he said, to protect his right flank; without it, his westward drive along the back of New Guinea’s plucked buzzard “would involve hazards rendering success doubtful.”
The issue was resolved in August, at the Quadrant conference in Quebec. Ironically, this boldest stratagem of the Pacific war was decided, not on its merits, but because the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs were searching for a compromise. The British wanted more U.S. troops and more landing craft in the European theater. They didn’t see why the American offensive against Japan couldn’t be mounted on a single front—Nimitz’s, in the central Pacific—and U.S. admirals were inclined to agree with them. Roosevelt and his political advisers demurred, however. They had to reckon with MacArthur’s popularity at home. Already Time had warned that MacArthur “is in command of a secondary theater of operations . . . it is plain that this state of affairs is precisely the opposite of what he expected when he was ordered to leave Corregidor and the men on Bataan. It is also plain that it is the opposite of what the U.S. people have expected.” In the end FDR sided with MacArthur’s strongest supporter at the conference—George Marshall. MacArthur never acknowledged Marshall’s strong support at Quebec and elsewhere, and it is possible that he never knew of it. Nevertheless, it was crucial. As a result of it, point thirty-five of Quadrant’s final directive ordered “the seizure or neutralization of eastern New Guinea as far west as Wewak. . . . Rabaul is to be neutralized rather than captured.”127
So much for the argument that bypassing Rabaul was MacArthur’s idea. If that won’t stand up, however, the fact remains that he transformed the bypass maneuver into the war’s most momentous strategic concept. Here the most impressive testimony comes from the Japanese. After the war Colonel Matsuichi Juio, a senior intelligence officer who had been charged with deciphering the General’s intentions, told an interrogator that MacArthur’s swooping envelopment of Nipponese bastions was “the type of strategy we hated most.” The General, he said, repeatedly, “with minimum losses, attacked and seized a relatively weak area, constructed airfields and then proceeded to cut the supply lines to [our] troops in that area. . . . Our strongpoints were gradually starved out. The Japanese Army preferred direct [frontal] assault, after the German fashion, but the Americans flowed into our weaker points and submerged us, just as water seeks the weakest entry to sink a ship. We respected this type of strategy . . . because it gained the most while losing the least.”128
MacArthur’s soldiers were less appreciative. Raised in the Depression and distrustful of heroics, they were alienated by the tone—to say nothing of the inaccuracies—of his communiques. Criticism of him was so widespread among wounded soldiers returning home from the Southwest Pacific that Vandenberg suspected a White House conspiracy. He wrote Robert E. Wood: “I am disturbed about one thing which to me is quite inexplicable. I am constantly hearing reports that veterans returning from the South[west] Pacific are not enthusiastic about our friend. One skeptical correspondent has gone so far as to suggest that there is some sort of diabolical arrangement to see to it that only anti-MacArthur veterans are furloughed home.”129
As every man who served in the Southwest Pacific knows, there was no such plot. Though GIs would proudly identify themselves as members of his army, they disparaged their commander in chief, or rather the image of himself he had created. Distrust of great commanders by their troops is nothing new; the British rank and file loathed Wellington, and during the American Revolution, as Gore Vidal has pointed out, “the private soldiers disliked Washington as much as he disdained them.” In MacArthur’s case it was ironical, however, for
had his bitter men understood the consequences of the General’s strategy they would have taken a very different view. For every Allied serviceman killed, the General killed ten Japanese. Never in history, John Gunther wrote, had there been a commander so economical in the expenditure of his men’s blood. In this respect certain comparisons with ETO campaigns are staggering. During the single Battle of Anzio, 72,306 GIs fell. In the Battle of Normandy, Eisenhower lost 28,366. Between MacArthur’s arrival in Australia and his return to Philippine waters over two years later, his troops suffered just 27,684 casualties—and that includes Buna.130
In 1943 the axis of MacArthur’s attack had been northward, but with the arrival of the new year it bent sharply westward. He was driving toward the buzzard’s head, the Vogelkop Peninsula, beyond which lay the Moluccas, whence he could spring into the Philippines. He needed one more base in the Bismarck Sea, to convert the sea into an Allied lake and seal Rabauls tomb. “The Admiralty Islands in the Bismarck Archipelago,” he later wrote, “filled these requirements.”131
He had at least two other motives, one illustrative of a familiar flaw in his character and the other of his genius. The defect was his old conviction that the Japanese weren’t his only foes, that he must also contend with unscrupulous rivals in Washington, London, and, especially, the U.S. Navy. Although he occasionally borrowed ships from Nimitz, and lent him land-based aircraft from time to time, he regarded his fellow commander in chief in Honolulu as a competitor. In February, he knew, Nimitz would be seizing the islands of Roi, Kwajalein, and Eniwetok. The General was determined not to be outshone. He wanted the world’s attention focused on his own flashing sword. In four months, he knew, barring unforeseen reverses, the admiral would be landing marines on Saipan, which would be the first battlefield of the war to be inhabited by Japanese civilians. If it fell to the Americans, Hideki Tojo’s government would collapse. MacArthur didn’t actually want Nimitz to lose, of course, but he did want to be close enough to support him, so that newspaper headlines would report that the marines had received vital assistance from MacArthur’s bases, MacArthur’s air force, and—the last twist of the screw—MacArthur’s navy.