The dispute over the road to Japan

In the summer of 1944, as the Americans were finishing the fighting in the Marianas and at the western end of New Guinea, their high command was divided over which way to advance next towards Japan. General Douglas MacArthur demanded the liberation of the Philippines, including the archipelago’s largest island, Luzon, and the capital, Manila. The navy – and for a long time most of the planners in Washington as well – preferred to bypass Luzon and land on Formosa, that is Taiwan, and from there reach the coast of China. At the end of July President Franklin Delano Roosevelt heard both cases at Pearl Harbor (PL).

Popular chronologies of the war record that on 9 August 1944 Roosevelt chose MacArthur’s plan and rejected that of Admiral Chester Nimitz. No formal decision was taken on that day, however. According to the official history of the US Army, the conference at Pearl Harbor on 26–28 July did not settle the dispute, and according to some studies all that reached MacArthur around 9 August was a personal letter from the president announcing that he would back his plan on his return to Washington. The main advocate of Formosa was Admiral Ernest King, not Nimitz, whose support for it, according to the official history, was growing ever cooler and may have been partly out of deference to King. The binding decisions were taken only by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff: on 15 September for a landing on Leyte, and on 3 October for the capture of Luzon instead of Formosa.

Two roads across the Pacific

From 1943 the Americans had been advancing towards Japan along two routes. In the South-West Pacific, MacArthur’s forces were moving along the coast of New Guinea – in April 1944 they landed at Hollandia, and on 30 July they took Sansapor on the Vogelkop (Bird’s Head) Peninsula unopposed. In the Central Pacific, Nimitz’s forces were taking one archipelago after another, and in June they entered the Marianas; the Battle of the Philippine Sea destroyed the air groups of the Japanese carriers. The two routes converged on the triangle formed by Luzon, Formosa and the Chinese coast, and it was there that the next great objective had to be chosen.

In March 1944 the Joint Chiefs instructed MacArthur to prepare to enter the southern Philippines before the end of the year and to plan an invasion of Luzon for February 1945; at the same time Nimitz was to prepare an attack on Formosa for the same date. Which of the two operations would take priority was left open. In mid-June, emboldened by the success of the Normandy landings and the imminent invasion of the Marianas, the Joint Chiefs even asked both commanders whether both the Philippines and Formosa might be bypassed. MacArthur and Nimitz both replied that air bases in the southern or central Philippines had to be seized first. The Joint Chiefs – somewhat reluctantly, according to the official history – accepted this. The question of what came next remained open: Luzon or Formosa.

Luzon or Formosa

The advocates of Formosa had strong arguments. The island lay closer to Japan than Luzon; from its airfields and ports Japanese shipping from South-East Asia through the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea could be cut more effectively than from Luzon alone. Formosa was also to be a stepping stone to a port on the Chinese coast, through which China was to be supplied and from which further operations would be mounted, while the Army Air Forces saw it as a base for B-29 bombers, which from northern Formosa could carry a heavier bomb load over Japan than from the more distant Luzon. The most consistent champion of this concept was Admiral King, Commander-in-Chief of the United States Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations. He believed that taking Luzon first would merely delay more decisive operations further north, and that if Formosa were bypassed the next objective should be Japan itself, not Luzon. According to the official history of the US Army, until mid-September the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, and most of the military planners in Washington also leaned towards Formosa.

MacArthur countered that Luzon was more valuable than Formosa. He argued that without recovering the whole archipelago Japan could not be fully cut off from the raw materials of the south, that an invasion of Formosa without air support and bases on Luzon would be too risky, and that the road through Luzon would prove cheaper in time, men and money. For him, however, the most important argument was political and moral: the Philippines were a dependency of the United States, most of their people had remained loyal, and recovering the islands as quickly as possible was, in his view, a national obligation. Bypassing Luzon would mean – so he argued – leaving millions of Filipinos, as well as interned and imprisoned Americans, under occupation and a food blockade, and the loss of American honour and prestige in the Far East. There was a personal dimension too: in March 1942, after his arrival in Australia, MacArthur had publicly promised: “I came through and I shall return.”

Contrary to MacArthur’s impression that the plan to bypass Luzon was the navy’s invention, both services were divided on the matter. Most senior commanders in the Pacific – including naval ones – leaned towards Luzon. Admiral William Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, wanted to take Luzon and to strike at Okinawa instead of Formosa. Halsey later recounted a conversation between his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Robert Carney, and King: asked whether he wanted to turn Manila into another London, Carney is said to have replied that he wanted to turn Luzon into another England – that is, a great base for operations against Japan. Among the Joint Chiefs themselves, only Admiral William Leahy, the president’s chief of staff, then favoured Luzon.

The meeting at Pearl Harbor

In July 1944, a few days after accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for a fourth term, Roosevelt set off on a journey to the Pacific. On 26 July the cruiser USS Baltimore brought him to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. That same day MacArthur flew in from Australia; as he later wrote, he would have preferred to stay with his troops and regarded the summons as partly a propaganda exercise in an election year. The talks on 27 and 28 July were attended by the president, MacArthur, Nimitz and Leahy. All agreed that the southern or central Philippines had to be entered first. MacArthur then argued that Luzon must be taken before Formosa, while Nimitz presented a plan for a thrust across the western Pacific straight to Formosa, bypassing Luzon.

According to MacArthur’s own account in his memoirs, he warned the president that abandoning the Filipinos would provoke an outcry in America that would turn against Roosevelt at the polls in the autumn. This account, written years later, is not confirmed by records of the conference, of which no minutes were kept. Leahy recalled that Roosevelt acted as an impartial arbiter, skilfully steering the discussion. The official history of the US Army states briefly that no strategic decisions were apparently taken at Pearl Harbor. MacArthur nevertheless left convinced that he had won the president over.

After the meeting Roosevelt also visited the Aleutians and Alaska, and on 12 August, at the navy yard in Bremerton, he gave a radio address reporting on his journey. A little over a week after the meeting MacArthur received a letter from the president which, according to some studies, reached him on 9 August. In it, as MacArthur quotes it, the president assured him that on his return he would “push” the plan, because he was convinced that it was logical and feasible. This letter is most probably the source of the date of 9 August in popular chronologies. It was, however, an expression of personal support, not an order: Roosevelt did not impose a solution on the Joint Chiefs, and the dispute went on in Washington for more than two months.

What really settled the dispute

Through August and September the outcome was decided not by speeches but by calculations. With each new version, the plans for the operation against Formosa, code-named Causeway, called for more troops, as the staff officers concluded that the mountainous island with its Japanese garrison would have to be taken and held in its entirety. Nimitz’s latest variant envisaged simultaneous landings in the south of Formosa and in the Amoy (Xiamen) area on the Chinese coast. Army planners judged that the Japanese would counter-attack from the north of the island and from the mainland, and that American air power would be unable to neutralise all the airfields in the region. According to September estimates, such an operation would be short of between 77,000 and 200,000 service troops, who could be supplied only after the end of the war in Europe. MacArthur, by contrast, could count on the help of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, and the logisticians reckoned that he would land on Luzon before the end of 1944, regardless of the situation in Europe. General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., designated to command the ground forces for the operation, was also critical of the plan.

At the same time the situation in China was deteriorating. In mid-September General Joseph Stilwell reported that the Japanese Operation Ichi-Go was overrunning the last airfields in eastern China from which American aircraft could support an invasion of Luzon or Formosa. A port on the Chinese coast, for which Formosa was to be the stepping stone, was losing its point.

The breakthrough came with the raids by Halsey’s Third Fleet on the Philippines in September. Faced with weak resistance from Japanese aircraft, on 13 September Halsey proposed abandoning the intermediate objectives and striking at the central Philippines earlier. MacArthur agreed, and on 15 September the Joint Chiefs, then meeting at the Quebec Conference, approved a landing on Leyte as early as 20 October instead of in December, bypassing Mindanao. MacArthur promised to land on Luzon on 20 December, two months earlier than any possible date for an attack on Formosa.

At the end of September Nimitz, who by now shared the reservations of Buckner and Admiral Raymond Spruance, presented King with a new plan at a meeting in San Francisco: Luzon in December, Iwo Jima at the end of January 1945 and Okinawa from 1 March. King finally gave way. On 3 October 1944 the Joint Chiefs of Staff directed MacArthur to land on Luzon around 20 December, and Nimitz to carry out operations against Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Formosa operation was not formally cancelled – the decision was deferred – but its planning was never seriously resumed.

Significance

On 20 October 1944 American troops landed on Leyte, and MacArthur, having waded ashore, announced over the radio: “People of the Philippines, I have returned.” A few days later the Battle of Leyte Gulf sealed the defeat of the Japanese navy, which had thrown almost all its forces into the fight to prevent Japan from being cut off from the raw materials of the south. The Americans landed on Luzon in January 1945, later than planned, and in the battle for the island Manila was almost completely destroyed in February and March 1945; an estimated 100,000 civilians died there. Formosa remained in Japanese hands until the end of the war, and its role as the last stepping stone before Japan was taken over by Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

The dispute, which the Pearl Harbor meeting did not settle, is still sometimes presented as a clash between strategy and politics. Robert Ross Smith, author of the official history of the US Army, concluded, however, that logistical considerations alone would have forced the Joint Chiefs to choose Luzon, although other military and perhaps also political realities may have influenced the final shape of the decision. The sequence of operations fixed on 3 October – Leyte, Luzon, Iwo Jima, Okinawa – marked out the road the United States followed towards Japan in the last year of the war.