Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [22]
This, then, was the background against which the supreme commander of SWPA arrived on Oahu, Hawaii, in July 1944, to meet Roosevelt and Nimitz. MacArthur’s tardy arrival reflected his distaste for the encounter. If he chafed at the need to parley by signal with the joint chiefs of staff in Washington, he found it intolerable to be obliged to fly several thousand miles to confer with a civilian politician, albeit the greatest in the land. MacArthur believed that Roosevelt had summoned the Hawaii meeting for political purposes, to further his re-election campaign by showcasing himself before the American people as their commander-in-chief. “The humiliation of forcing me44 to leave my command to fly to Honolulu for a picture-taking junket!” the general exclaimed furiously during the twenty-six-hour flight from Australia. For once, his paranoia was probably justified. His scepticism about the Hawaii meeting was shared by Admiral King. Roosevelt was always party to the big decisions, and on several important occasions—for instance, when he insisted upon the November 1942 North African landings despite the deep reluctance of his chiefs of staff—he dictated them. Nonetheless, U.S. strategy in the Second World War was dominated by compromises between rival service chiefs. This explains the curled lips of King and MacArthur when, in July 1944, Roosevelt sought to be seen to play the part of supreme warlord as he offered himself to the American people for an unprecedented fourth term.
The struggle with Japan had moved many thousands of miles since the Hawaiian Islands fell victim to the 7 December 1941 air assault, but they remained America’s principal rear base and staging area for the Pacific campaign. “Pearl was mostly brass and hookers45,” in the laconic words of cruiser bosun’s mate Eugene Hardy. Combat officers who visited the islands’ headquarters complexes were irked by the sybaritic comfort in which staffs did their business. Regular Saturday-night dances were held at Schofield Barracks. “There were dinner parties46, beach parties and cocktail parties,” wrote a Marine general, O. P. Smith. “At some of the parties the women guests wore evening gowns. You had the feeling that you were half in the war and half out of it.” Personnel based on Hawaii shrugged that it would give no help to the men at the sharp end to impose a spurious austerity. After protests by visitors from the combat zone, however, officers’ clubs abandoned the practice of serving steak twice a day.
Roosevelt’s most important meetings on Hawaii took place at the Kalaukau Avenue mansion of a prominent Waikiki citizen, Chris Holmes. Naval aviators had been billeted there for some time, and for a week before the grandees’ arrival, working parties from the submarine base laboured overtime to repair the fliers’ depredations. The house then became the setting for performances by two remarkable thespians, the president and the General of the Army, together with a supreme professional, the Pacific Fleet’s C-in-C. The only issue which interested MacArthur was resolution of the Pacific route by which the U.S. should continue its advance upon Japan. Even as Roosevelt, Nimitz and MacArthur conferred, the U.S. Navy and Marines were completing the capture of the Mariana island group. On 19 and 20 June 1944, in the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” carrier planes of Admiral Raymond Spruance’s Fifth Fleet had inflicted devastating defeat, indeed near annihilation, upon Japan’s naval air force. Around 475 enemy aircraft were destroyed, by comparison with the 60 Luftwaffe planes shot down by the RAF on 15 September 1940, the biggest day of the Battle of Britain. The island chain, a mere 1,400 miles south-east of Japan, represented a vital link in the American advance. Its capture made possible the construction of air bases from which B-29 bombers could reach Tokyo. Its loss was by far the most important Japanese defeat of 1944, a decisive