1 Crusade Like a faithful steed, USS Boise plunged through the deep blue waters of the South China Sea, the ship's prow knifing gracefully through the relentless waves, bound for Luzon. Below deck, inside a snug, well-appointed private cabin, General Douglas MacArthur sat at a desk, pen in hand, preparing to write a letter to his wife on January 8, 1945, the eve of the largest invasion to date in the war against Japan. At once a magisterial and vexing figure, MacArthur oozed a sense of captivating uniqueness. He was the only US Army field commander who had once served at the very top of the Army as chief of staff. Only he among all the Army ground generals in the Pacific had been decorated with the Medal of Honor, a distinction he shared with his late father, Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur, who had four decades earlier led American military forces in the Philippines. During World War II, Douglas MacArthur had experienced, by far, more frontline combat than any other American general of four-star rank, only adding to a record of valor that he had already carved out as a younger officer in the First World War. In 1929, he had endured a difficult, stormy divorce from his first wife, Louise Cromwell, putting the lie to Army conventional wisdom that a failed marriage for an officer would inevitably lead to a failed career. Eight years later, he married Jean Faircloth, daughter of a Nashville banker and his true soul mate, who bore him a son named Arthur the next year. Astonishingly, MacArthur subsequently chose-in direct defiance of a War Department order to evacuate military families-to keep them with him in 1941-42, when he led the ill-fated Allied defense of the Philippines. He thus became the only high-level American commander to expose his family to combat in World War II. With unrepentant independence, he continued to live with his family throughout much of the war, seemingly indifferent to the fact that his many thousands of subordinates enjoyed no such option. In yet another characteristic action that revealed much about his broke-the-mold distinctiveness, he had willfully crossed the red line that sensibly separates the civil and the military in the American system by running an unsuccessful clandestine campaign to win the presidency in 1944. Complex to the point of near convolution, an intimate aide once said of the general, "None of us knew MacArthur. We all saw fragments of the man." Over three long years of war, he had carved out a record as a thoughtful military strategist, an innovator with a strong grasp of the potency of airpower and sea power, and an inspirational figure whose keen understanding of image approached the savant level. But far too often, he had also revealed himself to be a petty, paranoid, insecure, vainglorious, egomaniacal schemer who seemingly viewed Washington policy makers as adversaries on par with the Japanese. An ardent opponent of the Allies' Europe First policy, he believed with an almost evangelical fervor that America's geopolitical future lay in Asia and the Pacific. His greatest objective-perhaps as much as or more than defeating Japan-was to liberate the Philippines. His invasion of Leyte a couple months earlier had served only as a warm-up act for what he envisioned as an archipelago-wide liberation, most notably of Luzon, his former home, with himself playing an almost predestined, messianic role. Lieutenant Colonel Weldon "Dusty" Rhoades, his personal pilot and a close intimate, once opined of his chief that "he had some feeling that he was a man of destiny. He seemed to believe that he was especially protected so that he could fulfill a mission." MacArthur loved the people of the Philippines with almost familial intensity. In his mind, the impending invasion of Luzon equated to something of a twentieth-century crusade. Only a few weeks shy of his sixty-fifth birthday, MacArthur remained physically robust, though he now combed strands of black hair over his balding pate in an apparent effort to conceal the encroachment of senior citizenship. He seldom allowed photographs of himself bareheaded, preferring instead to wear a specially designed, braided cap most everywhere he went. Upscale sunglasses and a corncob pipe completed a look that seemingly only he could pull off. Hunched over the desk inside his cabin aboard Boise, MacArthur scrawled his letter to Jean on personal stationery. "The Boise is the most comfortable cruiser on which I have traveled. The suite I occupy is much larger, has artificial ventilation and better cooking than the others." Battle-hardened Boise's modernity reflected the stupendous and growing power of the US Navy by 1945. By the same token, MacArthur and his Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) command could be said to symbolize the corresponding maturation of the US Army during the war with Japan. He had once led a poorly equipped, sparsely fed colonial-style army in the Philippines but now presided over the largest ground force ever assembled for amphibious island warfare, and these legions were only one component of a larger army that had now grown to full maturity. Indeed, nearly 1.4 million soldiers were now serving throughout the Pacific and Asia. By war's end, the number would swell to 1.8 million, the third-largest ground force ever sent overseas by the United States to fight a war. Superbly equipped, highly mechanized, well fed and well led, the Army of the Pacific/Asia theater reflected the bounty of the nation that produced it, and it was shouldering the onerous responsibility of expeditionary-style warfare in far-flung, inhospitable locales. Army soldiers were doing the lion's share of the fighting and dying in the Pacific, particularly in the Philippines, the true nexus of the American war against Japan. And yet, contemporary and subsequent popular memory tended to focus on the more publicity savvy and extraordinarily valorous Marines, who had carved out a distinguished combat record but were far fewer in number than the soldiers. Even now, in 1945's infancy, the Army labored in an almost unbelievable diversity of missions-combat and noncombat-that included ostensibly everything from the logistics of loading and shipping to guerrilla warfare, from diplomacy to cutting-edge medical care, and from civil affairs to engineering of such sophistication as to lay foundations of knowledge to benefit future generations. Spread over nearly one-third of the globe's surface of island, sea, and continent, it was an army of such size and diversity of purpose as to make one unified command nearly impossible-MacArthur controlled only about 60 percent of Army combat formations. Over three years, the Army had steadily fought its way northward from the South Pacific to the Central Pacific and now beyond. The Army's evolution into an extraordinarily potent, modern military force paralleled the maturation of the US Navy into the most powerful maritime force in global history, a behemoth of sea power upon which rested the foundation of the American war against Japan. The Army Air Forces, particularly the B-29 formations that were beginning to bomb Japan itself, only added to this prodigious combination of American military strength that, in tandem with America's theater allies, now amounted to a dagger at the Japanese throat. Allied victory now seemed certain, and yet the tasks ahead, especially for the US Army, were daunting in the extreme. The impending liberation of the Philippines, the opening of a viable landward supply route to China, and the seizure of key islands on the doorstep of Japan all loomed as costly enterprises on the immediate drawing board. And somewhere beyond, like an Everest on the horizon, a horrendously bloody invasion of Japan beckoned as a serious possibility, perhaps even a necessity. So the essential question now was how much it would cost the Allies, and most notably the Army, in lives, treasure, and time to subdue Japan, a country still tightly controlled by a defiant cabal of civil and military elites who were loyally supported by millions of soldiers, sailors, and even ordinary citizens, most of whom seemed more than willing to fight on indefinitely, unto the death. The first answers to this disquieting question would now come at Luzon, the target of an enormous American task force of which USS Boise was only one relatively small component. For nearly forty miles in any direction around Boise, the huge invasion armada of some 700 ships carried or escorted 203,000 soldiers from all over General MacArthur's enormous SWPA empire; about one-third of these men were noncombat service troops. The soldiers hailed from a geographically diverse network of bases, ranging from Leyte to the picked-over South Pacific burgs of Nouméa, Sansapor, Aitape, Finschhafen-Toem, Hollandia, Oro Bay, Noemfoor, Cape Gloucester, and Bougainville, places whose vast distances from one another would have encompassed a substantial chunk of the United States itself. Once boarded, most of the soldiers never returned to these places, their very absence a powerful reminder that the war had moved forever northward to enter its final bloody phase. Perhaps sensing this, base commanders on Bougainville staged a memorable send-off for Major General Oscar Griswold, the XIV Corps commander who had masterminded the American victory on that island and had since spent over half a year there preparing his men to go back into combat. Under a bright tropical sun, as LSTs and other troopships loaded with soldiers from the 37th Infantry Division and XIV Corps stood just offshore, color guards gathered at a dock to honor the popular general. "Marine band played honorary concert at old CP," Griswold tersely related to his diary. "Guard of honor at beach." Army and Navy honor guards stood at attention alongside Griswold. At the pier he shook hands with several dozen officers who lined up respectfully to send him off. Perhaps most significantly, the well-wishers included Lieutenant General Stanley Savige, whose II Corps of the Australian Imperial Force now took over the unglamorous task of garrisoning the backwater island and containing the remnants of the Japanese forces, a mute microcosm of Australia's diminished role in the war. Only a few days before, the introspective Griswold had attended a memorial service at the military cemetery where many Marines and XIV Corps soldiers who had died fighting for Bougainville were buried. For Griswold, the visit was a sober reminder of the grave responsibilities of corps command. Once aboard USS Mount Olympus, the command ship for Griswold's good friend Vice Admiral Theodore Wilkinson, the general gravely intoned in his diary, "The time is growing short-may God give us his blessing and his help in the dark days up ahead, that we may draw this thing to a close and that peace once again may grace this war-torn world." MacArthur had once habitually kvetched about a supposed paucity of manpower and resources allotted by Washington decision makers to his theater. The complaints now seemed an embarrassment, almost akin to a man in a mansion crying poor. MacArthur's sizable army was larger than the US Army forces that had fought campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Southern France. Its size exceeded even the entire Allied ground complement at Sicily. Indeed, the SWPA armies now ranked behind only the large American ground forces fighting in western Europe. MacArthur's headquarters now directly controlled, or soon would control, impressively formidable combat forces. The order of battle included two armies, four corps, and fifteen divisions, plus regimental combat teams, independent tank formations, guerrilla units, and other attachments that only added to the girth. He earmarked Lieutenant General Walter Krueger's Sixth Army to carry out Mike I, the SWPA code name for the invasion of Luzon. The obvious place to invade was over the expansive beaches of Lingayen Gulf, where the Japanese had landed in late 1941. MacArthur and his staff initially hoped to surprise General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Japanese commander, by landing elsewhere, but eventually they bowed to the reality that only Lingayen could accommodate the huge numbers of troops, tanks, and other vehicles that the Americans intended to fling ashore. Moreover, Lingayen offered a nice gateway to the roads that snaked through Luzon's central plains to the crowning prize of Manila some 120 miles to the southeast. Krueger planned to land four divisions, plus an engineer special brigade and two boat and shore regiments. The 43rd Infantry Division was slated to land on the extreme left flank, from the invader's point of view, near San Fabian. The 6th Infantry Division would land immediately to the right. The two divisions would serve under the control of Major General Innis Palmer Swift's I Corps. Swift had commanded the 1st Cavalry Division at Los Negros, successfully enough that Krueger had since promoted him to corps command. Both divisions had fought in the South Pacific, the 43rd at New Georgia and the 6th at New Guinea, most notably Lone Tree Hill. To the right of I Corps, the 37th Infantry Division, hardened veterans of Bougainville, would land near Dagupan while the 40th Infantry Division, a California, Nevada, and Utah National Guard unit new to combat, was picked by the Sixth Army planners to hit the beaches on the extreme right flank near the town of Lingayen. These two divisions were controlled by Griswold's XIV Corps. In terms of American amphibious combat units, the landing forces exceeded those that had carried out the Normandy invasion at Utah and Omaha beaches. Follow-on forces under the control of the respective corps headquarters included the 32nd and 33rd Infantry Divisions, the 1st Cavalry Division, the 25th Infantry Division, the 158th Regimental Combat Team, the 112th Cavalry Regimental Combat Team, the 6th Ranger Infantry Battalion, and the 13th Armored Group, the latter of which possessed nearly as many tanks as the typical European theater armored division. Six more infantry divisions, plus the 11th Airborne Division and the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment would eventually become available for MacArthur's operations on Luzon and elsewhere in the archipelago. In the meantime, the invasion armada under Vice Admiral Thomas Kinkaid, who had worked closely with MacArthur for more than a year, sailed through the narrow waters of the Surigao Strait and then inexorably north, past the western coastlines of Negros, Panay, Mindoro, along with many smaller islands, and then off Luzon itself. In response, the Japanese scraped together their few remaining planes in the Philippines to launch a series of frantic kamikaze attacks. Lieutenant General Kyoji Tominaga, the air commander, routinely gave an eloquent farewell speech to these idealistic, extraordinarily courageous young pilots. "I know what you feel now as you put the sorrows and joys of life behind you because the Emperor's fortunes are failing. Do not worry about what happens when you die and what you leave behind you-for you will become gods. Soon I hope to have the privilege of joining you in glorious death." The appalling reality about the kamikaze fliers, and one that has never since abated in relation to suicide bombers, was that it took only one or two to cause serious damage. The law of averages dictated that, even against well-orchestrated combat air patrols and a wall of effective antiaircraft fire, some of the suicide planes were assured of surviving long enough to crash into a ship. A twin-engine bomber smashed into the flight deck of the escort carrier USS Ommaney Bay. The plane's bombs penetrated belowdecks and exploded, touching off a fire that the crew could not control. "Pandemonium broke out," Aviation Ordnanceman José "Andy" Chacón, an air crewman, recalled. "A barber jumped right into the turning propeller screw with a bag of money he kept in the barber shop. All we saw of him was a blotch of red sea water." Excerpted from To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan 1945 by John C. McManus All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
