Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [26]
Yet MacArthur, the man of destiny, believed that he had exploited the occasion to good effect. When he climbed back on his plane to return to Australia, barely twenty-four hours after landing on Hawaii, he declared triumphantly to his staff: “We’ve sold it!” He was justified in this assertion insofar as Roosevelt sailed home on 29 July, after a further two days visiting bases and hospitals, believing that the U.S. must retake the Philippines. Electoral considerations undoubtedly played a part in the presidential endorsement of MacArthur’s wishes. Roosevelt knew that the general’s political friends would raise a storm among American voters if they could claim that the suffering millions of the Philippines—America’s dependents or colonial subjects, according to taste—were being wantonly abandoned to continuing Japanese oppression.
Even after Hawaii, however, for several weeks the U.S. joint chiefs of staff havered. Marshall had once described the MacArthur plan for the Philippines as “the slow way…We would have to fight our way through them, and it would take a very much longer time than to make the cut across.” In north-west Europe, Eisenhower staunchly resisted pleas to liberate the starving Dutch people in the winter of 1944, arguing—surely rightly—that the welfare of the occupied peoples was best served by concentrating forces without diversion upon the defeat of Nazi Germany. Yet so great was the prestige of MacArthur, so effective was his emotional crusade for the Philippines’ liberation, that to gainsay him would have required a vastly different supreme command in Washington.
From the late summer of 1944 onwards, America’s difficulties in the Pacific related principally to the logistic challenges of supporting large forces at the limits of an oceanic supply chain. Moreover, in the early autumn, after MacArthur’s cheap successes in Papua New Guinea, there was no anticipation of the intensity of resistance the Japanese would offer on Leyte and Luzon. U.S. air and sea power had lately overwhelmed the enemy’s puny efforts wherever he accepted battle. Desperate courage and superior fieldcraft enabled Japanese soldiers often to inflict pain on American forces, but never to alter outcomes. For instance, a belated offensive at Aitape in New Guinea in July 1944 cost the Japanese 18th Army 10,000 dead, in exchange for killing some 440 Americans. U.S. forces paid with the lives of almost 7,000 men for the capture of the Marianas and later Peleliu—but the Japanese counted 46,000 dead. Such a dramatic balance in favour of the victors was small comfort to a Marine in a foxhole under mortar and machine-gun fire from an invisible enemy, with comrades bleeding around him. But it represented a reality which promoted optimism among American commanders in the autumn of 1944.
It was almost certainly the correct decision to undertake limited operations to straddle the Philippines with naval and air power, seizing bases, destroying Japanese aircraft and interdicting enemy shipping routes. MacArthur’s plans, however, were vastly more ambitious. He was bent upon a campaign of progressive liberation which could contribute little to expediting America’s advance upon the Japanese home islands. His first landing would be made in the south, on Mindanao. U.S. forces would then advance progressively via Leyte to the capture of the largest island, Luzon, which MacArthur assured the chiefs could be taken in a month. Nimitz, meanwhile, would prepare to capture the central Pacific island of Iwo Jima, and thereafter assault Okinawa.
Just as in Europe, where Eisenhower committed his armies to a broad-front advance, rather than favouring any one of his subordinate commanders’ operations above those of others, so in the war against Japan the U.S. continued the twin-track strategy, sustaining both MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines