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bent upon personally achieving the liberation of the seventeen million people of the Philippines, where he had spent much of his service life. A former chief of the army with powerful right-wing friends at home, in 1944 MacArthur flirted with a presidential election run against Roosevelt, abandoning this notion only when it became plain that he could not secure the Republican nomination, far less beat the White House incumbent. He remained an immensely formidable figure, hard for the chiefs of staff to resist, his prestige raised so high by domestic propaganda that he was effectively unsackable.

Navy planners argued that, with the Marianas air bases in US hands, the large Japanese army in the Philippines could be left to contemplate its own impotence while American forces addressed Iwo Jima, Okinawa and thereafter the Japanese home islands. There was a case for the US to undertake limited operations to secure some Philippines airfields and harbours, but none for what actually followed. MacArthur was bent upon fighting his way through the entire archipelago, and so he did. Although he never gained the formal endorsement of the chiefs of staff for his purposes, no one in Washington was powerful or clear-sighted enough to stop him. Marshall once wrote memorably to MacArthur, ‘Remember, the Navy is on our side’; the South-West Pacific supremo never acknowledged this.

In September 1944, carriers of Halsey’s Third Fleet off the southern Philippines inflicted punitive losses on Japan’s surviving air capability. On the 12th alone, 2,400 American sorties destroyed two hundred enemy planes in the sky and on the ground. Nimitz and MacArthur agreed that the island base of Peleliu should be seized before the army attacked the Philippines. On 15 September, men of 1st Marine Division made an assault landing with massive air and naval support: 10,000 Japanese defenders, supported by deeply emplaced artillery, resisted fiercely. The ensuing campaign, which also engaged a US Army division, proved a nightmare. Vast quantities of ammunition and effort had to be expended to overcome the enemy’s positions bunker by bunker. It was later calculated that 1,500 artillery rounds were fired for each defender killed. The Japanese, as usual, fought almost to the last man, and 1,950 Americans perished before Peleliu’s commander, Col. Kunio Nakagawa, committed suicide on 24 November. The battle, a violently intense miniature, was of doubtful value to American grand strategy. It merely reinforced the message that there was no shortcut to success in seizing Japan’s Pacific outposts.

On 20 October 1944, four army divisions began to land on Leyte island, in the midst of the Philippines. They met light opposition, and by afternoon the beachhead was sufficiently secure for MacArthur to stride ashore and deliver a grandiloquent liberation broadcast. Thereafter, however, increasingly vigorous Japanese resistance turned the campaign into an ordeal by rain, mud and blood for tens of thousands of US soldiers. MacArthur’s staff had ignored engineers’ warnings that Leyte was unsuitable for airfield building, and American troops found themselves overwhelmingly dependent on carrier planes for air support. MacArthur’s chief of public relations, Colonel Bonner Fellers, had made his reputation in 1942 by dispatching daily signals from Cairo reporting British operations and intentions, which were intercepted by Rommel. Now, Fellers added to his sorry record by repeatedly announcing victory on Leyte while MacArthur’s soldiers were fighting for their lives.

Week after week and then month after month, weather and mountains, insects and enemy fire, exhaustion and swamps imposed their toll of misery upon every infantryman on the island. ‘They lost all account of the distance they had covered,’ wrote Norman Mailer, who served in the Philippines, in his fictional account of a patrol which marched in painful step with his own experience. ‘Everything beneath them had blurred, and the individual torments of each kind of terrain were forgotten … They wavered like a file of drunks,