MacArthur in Australia

On the morning of 17 March 1942, at around 9.30, two American B-17 bombers landed at Batchelor airfield in the Northern Territory, several dozen kilometres south of Darwin. From the first stepped General Douglas MacArthur, who six days earlier had left Corregidor, crossed the Sulu Sea in PT boats and taken off from Mindanao during the night. According to some accounts the pilots made for Batchelor because a Japanese raid was expected over Darwin. That same day the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, announced that the general was in the country and that the Australian government had nominated him as supreme commander of the Allied forces in the region. For frightened Australians it was the best news in weeks. Within a few days MacArthur himself discovered that the army at whose head he was to set out to relieve the Philippines did not exist.

Australia in March 1942

The Australia to which MacArthur came was living through the worst weeks of its history. On 15 February Singapore had surrendered, and almost the whole of the Australian 8th Division had gone into captivity with it. Its battalions had also been killed or captured on Ambon, Timor and at Rabaul. On 19 February Japanese aircraft bombed Darwin, killing more than two hundred people, and on 3 March fighters from Timor strafed Broome in Western Australia, destroying flying boats full of refugees from Java. Java surrendered on 9 March, and on 8 March the Japanese landed at Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea, a few hundred kilometres from Port Moresby. In Australia an invasion was widely expected.

Curtin’s Labor government had understood as early as the end of December 1941 that Britain could not defend Australia. On 27 December the Prime Minister wrote in the Melbourne Herald that “without any inhibitions of any kind” Australia was turning to America, “free of any pangs as to our traditional links” with Britain. In February 1942, despite pressure from Churchill, he refused to send the Australian 7th Division, returning from the Middle East, to Burma and demanded that it come home. When Washington asked for MacArthur to be nominated as supreme commander, the Australian government did so at once. In Australian eyes the general was the one man who had held the Japanese back, and a guarantee that the United States would not leave them on their own.

Across the continent

From Batchelor MacArthur wanted to fly straight on to the south, but his wife Jean, after the ordeal of the previous days, refused to travel any further by air. General Ralph Royce, chief of staff to General George Brett, suggested cars, but the party’s doctor warned that four-year-old Arthur, exhausted by travel sickness and being fed intravenously, might not survive several hundred kilometres of unmade road across the desert. In the end the party flew in two Australian National Airways airliners to Alice Springs in the centre of the continent, and from there set off by a hastily assembled train on the narrow-gauge Central Australia line. The train crawled across the desert at no more than 30 kilometres an hour, and the journey to Terowie in South Australia took two days and nights.

During this journey MacArthur learned what really awaited him in Australia. He had counted on an army that he would lead to the Philippines. Instead there were in the country, by various estimates, between about 25,000 and 30,000 American servicemen, mostly airmen, gunners and supply troops, without a single infantry division. There were about a hundred serviceable combat aircraft. The best Australian divisions, the 6th and 7th, were only now returning from the Middle East, the 9th Division was fighting in North Africa, and the 8th Division had been lost in Malaya and Singapore. What remained at home were mainly poorly trained and poorly armed militia units. According to accounts cited by the general’s biographers, on hearing these figures MacArthur whispered: “God have mercy on us.” Some of his officers later claimed that it was the greatest shock he suffered in the whole war.

“I came through and I shall return”

On the afternoon of 20 March, at about 2 p.m., the train stopped at the small railway station of Terowie, where the party was to change to a broad-gauge train. MacArthur was astonished to find a crowd of local people, a military guard of honour and journalists on the platform. He made a short statement. The President of the United States, he said, had ordered him to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia, as he understood it, in order to organise an American offensive against Japan, one of whose chief objectives was the relief of the Philippines. He ended: “I came through and I shall return.”

The last words, “I shall return”, became MacArthur’s most famous phrase. The idea was reportedly suggested to him by the Filipino journalist and officer Carlos Romulo, who had, however, proposed “we shall return”. When the American Office of War Information later wanted to change the statement to the plural, Romulo himself objected: the Filipinos, he explained, felt let down by America, but they believed in MacArthur, and it was his personal word that mattered to them. MacArthur never changed it. His critics saw it as yet another example of the way he placed himself at the centre of events.

On the evening of 20 March, in Adelaide, the party changed to a saloon carriage attached to an express train, and on the morning of 21 March, at about 9 a.m., it arrived at Spencer Street station in Melbourne. It was greeted by the Minister for the Army, Frank Forde, and a crowd of citizens. MacArthur took up residence at the Menzies Hotel and in the city, then the seat of the Australian staffs, began to build his headquarters from the officers he had brought with him from Corregidor.

The medal and the alliance with Curtin

On 25 March MacArthur was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest American military decoration, for preparing the Philippines for defence and for directing the fighting on Bataan. The idea came from the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, who wrote the citation himself. He wanted in this way to deprive Axis propaganda, which portrayed MacArthur as a commander fleeing from his troops, of its arguments. General Dwight Eisenhower, then an officer on Marshall’s staff, pointed out that MacArthur had not performed the act of valour required by the regulations. Marshall cited the precedent of Charles Lindbergh, decorated in 1927 for his flight across the Atlantic. MacArthur declared that he regarded the medal as a tribute to the “indomitable courage” of the army he had commanded. He and his father, General Arthur MacArthur, decorated during the Civil War, were the first father and son both to hold the Medal of Honor.

On 26 March MacArthur came to Canberra and met Curtin and the Advisory War Council. According to accounts, he told the Prime Minister that the two of them would “see this thing through together”, and that Curtin should take care of the rear and he would handle the front. In the evening, at a reception in Parliament House, he assured Australians that he had come as a soldier in a “great crusade”, that there could be no compromise – “we shall win or we shall die” – and that he placed the full might of his country at their disposal. So began a partnership that lasted until the end of the war. Curtin, a man of the left and a former anti-militarist, judged that Australia’s voice would best be heard in Washington through MacArthur, and agreed to place Australian forces under him.

The formal decisions were taken in the same weeks. On 24 March the Combined Chiefs of Staff recognised the Pacific as an area of United States responsibility, and on 30 March the American Joint Chiefs of Staff divided it into the Pacific Ocean Areas under Admiral Chester Nimitz and the South West Pacific Area under MacArthur, comprising Australia, New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines and part of the Solomon Islands. This division, forced through by Admiral Ernest King, who did not want to put the fleet under the command of an army general, meant that the war against Japan would have no single commander.

From his first days in Melbourne MacArthur demanded from Washington what Washington could not give him: aircraft carriers, more divisions and hundreds of aircraft, with which he wanted to go over to the offensive as soon as possible. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Marshall, however, held to the strategy agreed with the British, under which Germany was to be defeated first, while in the Pacific the aim was merely to hold the lines of communication with Australia and prevent further Japanese conquests. This dispute over resources accompanied MacArthur throughout the war. For the time being he could only defend himself with what he had and look for a place where the Japanese could be stopped as far as possible from Australian cities. He chose New Guinea: he concluded that the defence must begin at Port Moresby and in the Owen Stanley Range, not on the Australian coast.

Place in the war

On 18 April 1942 MacArthur formally assumed supreme command in the South-West Pacific. The Australian General Thomas Blamey, just back from the Middle East, became commander of the Allied land forces, Brett commanded the air forces and Vice Admiral Herbert Leary the naval forces. On 17 April Curtin instructed Australian forces to treat MacArthur’s orders as if they came from the government. In April and May two infantry divisions, the 41st and the 32nd, arrived from America, and in July MacArthur moved his headquarters from Melbourne to Brisbane, closer to the front.

He could not lead the relief of the Philippines that he had promised at Terowie. Bataan surrendered on 9 April and Corregidor on 6 May, and the prisoners went through the death march and the Japanese camps. Throughout 1942 MacArthur fought for Australia itself and for New Guinea: after the Battle of the Coral Sea in May, in the fighting on the Kokoda Track and at Milne Bay, and in the bloody campaign for Buna and Gona at the turn of 1942 and 1943, Australian and American troops stopped the Japanese short of Port Moresby and then drove them from the coasts of Papua. Only on 20 October 1944 did MacArthur wade ashore on the island of Leyte and announce to the Filipinos over the radio: “I have returned.” The words spoken at a small station in South Australia had come true after two and a half years, at a price paid also by those in the Philippines who had waited for his return.