George Marshall: A Biography by Debi Unger & Irwin Unger & Stanley Hirshson

Author:Debi Unger & Irwin Unger & Stanley Hirshson [Unger, Debi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-10-20T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

JAPAN-CHINA

The three months between the two “V-Days” were fraught with challenges for Marshall. But foremost, of course, was how to defeat Japan. By mid-1945 the end was already foreshadowed, yet much effort, risk, and loss remained before the tenacious and zealous Japanese leaders and people would allow foreign troops to occupy the precious soil of Nippon and the despised gaijin (foreigners) to dictate the affairs of the sacred empire.

By V-E Day, Japan was under ferocious attack on multiple fronts and from all dimensions.

Advancing from the south were MacArthur’s ground forces under the plodding Walter Krueger, a Marshall choice as combat commander. For months Marshall had wavered over whether the best course was to invade or bypass the Philippines on the way to Japan. He understood MacArthur’s attitudes and loyalties and to some extent shared them. But the chief of staff warned the general not to allow “personal feelings and Philippine political considerations” to distort his judgment. The defeat of Japan must be the primary goal, always kept in view.1 Yet when it came to adopting a definite strategy for the military push northward toward Japan, Marshall vacillated and dithered.

All through the first half of 1944 Marshall had continued to send mixed signals about MacArthur’s Philippines-first plans. In late January, General Sutherland, his chief of staff, appeared in Washington to present his boss’s case to the War Department and the Joint Chiefs. Marshall reassured him that the planners were leaning toward MacArthur’s views. Soon after, however, Admiral King descended on the Joint Chiefs to defend the navy’s emphasis on the Central Pacific thrust. Rather than directly oppose the admiral’s plans, Marshall called for further study. Annoyed by the wavering of his professional superiors in Washington, MacArthur made a personal appeal to Stimson for greater authority generally over operations in the Pacific, including control of the naval forces he needed for a Philippine campaign. In defense of his drive from the south he noted the costliness of the island-by-island investment in the Central Pacific thrust. “These frontal attacks by the Navy . . . are a tragic and unnecessary massacre of American lives.” He was appealing directly to Stimson, he said, because FDR was “Navy minded. . . . Give me central direction of the war in the Pacific,” he declared, and he would “be in the Philippines in ten months’ time.”2

In the following months MacArthur and King, either directly or through their surrogates, would continue to tangle over final Pacific strategy, and in the end Marshall avoided taking responsibility for the result. It would be the president himself who settled the issue of where army troops would be deployed next in the Pacific.

The setting for the decision was Hawaii, far from mainland U.S. shores. In late July 1944 FDR met with MacArthur in Oahu accompanied by Admirals Nimitz and Leahy while Marshall remained behind in Washington attending staff meetings and conducting routine business. Though commander in chief by constitutional mandate, Roosevelt had often deferred to Marshall and the Joint Chiefs, especially toward the war’s end.

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