William Manchester: A Fanfare for Failure

The wreckage of a Kawanishi H8K2 Seaplane in Butaritari Lagoon during the Battle of Tarawa

One perverse irony of war, William Manchester found, is how it sanctifies bloody disasters while underrating undramatic military victories.

“Time (magazine) trumpeted the defense of the American tactics: ‘Last week some 2,000 or 3,000 United States Marines, most of them now dead or wounded, gave the nation a name to stand beside those of … the Alamo, Little Big Horn and Belleau Wood. The name was Tarawa,’” Manchester wrote in his 1979 memoir Goodbye, Darkness. As a sergeant, he’d been in the middle of that 76-hour battle in which roughly 6,400 Japanese, Koreans and Americans died, mostly on and around the small coral island of Betio in the Tarawa Atoll.

“That made everyone on Betio stand tall, but it deserves second thoughts. The Alamo and Little Big Horn were massacres for Americans, and the Fifth and Sixth Marines had been cut to pieces in Belleau Wood. Time’s comment may be attributed to a curious principle which seems to guide those who write of titanic battles. The longer the casualty lists — the vaster the investment in blood — the greater the need to justify the slain. Thus the fallen are honored by hallowing the names of the places were they fell, thus writers enshrine in memory the Verduns, the Passchendaeles, the Dunkirks and the Iwo Jimas, while neglecting decisive struggles in which the loss of life was small.

“At the turn of the 18^th century, the Duke of Marlborough led 10 successful, relatively bloodless campaigns on the Continent, after which he was hounded into exile by his political enemies. In World War I, Douglas Haig butchered the flower of England’s youth on the Somme and in Flanders without winning a single victory. He was raised to the peerage and awarded 100,000 pounds by a grateful Parliament...”

“Similarly, in World War II, Anzio and Peleliu are apotheosized, though neither contributed to the defeat of Germany and Japan, while the capture of Ulithi, one of the Pacific’s finest anchorages, is unsung since the enemy had evacuated it, and Hollandia, (Gen. Douglas) MacArthur’s greatest triumph in that war, is forgotten because the general’s genius outfoxed the Japanese and limited his losses to a handful of GIs.

“In the Pacific, we received ‘pony’ editions — reduced in size, with no ads — of Time and the New Yorker. The comparison of Tarawa with great battles of the past didn’t impress most of us; we saw it for what it was: wartime propaganda designed to boost the morale of subscribers, a sophisticated version of the rhapsodies about the Glorious Dead who had Given Their All, making the Supreme Sacrifice. Our sympathies were with those who protested the high casualties.”

From his vantage point on the battlefield, Manchester immediately saw through military myth-making, but years would pass before he could bring himself to cast a cold eye on other hypocrisies of war. “At the time it was impolitic to pay the slightest tribute to the enemy, and Nip determination, their refusal to say die, was commonly attributed to ‘fanaticism,’” he recalled. “In retrospect, it is indistinguishable from heroism. To call it anything less cheapens the victory, for American valor was necessary to defeat it.” 

Not the Rights They Were Fighting For

The bored Marines stood at attention, listening to Buck Rogers describe homosexual sex acts.

In his WWII Pacific combat memoir Goodbye, Darkness, William Manchester recalled that his captain, “Buck” Rogers, would read aloud from Navy courts-martial arising from sexual indiscretions.

“As unsubtly as possible, we were being warned that no matter how horny we got, we couldn’t go down on each other,” Manchester wrote. “It mystified us. Youth is more sophisticated today, but in our innocence we knew almost nothing about homosexuality.”

“There was so much excitement (and apocrypha about) heterosexuality that we seldom gave homosexuality a second thought. Had we been told that practitioners of oral sodomy wanted to live together openly, with the approval of society, and insisted on being called ‘gay,’ we would have guffawed. That just wasn’t one of the rights we were fighting to protect. We weren’t exactly prejudiced. It was, literally, mindlessness. We hadn’t thought about it. That didn’t make it unique. We weren’t fighting for the emancipation of housewives, either, or for the right of blacks, who performed menial, if safe, tasks far behind the lines, to bleed alongside us. Like most soldiers in most wars, we were fighting for status quo ante bellum. And like the others, we were doomed to disappointment.”

All those bored Marines knew were that perverts were guys who lisped and longed to put on a dress. “Therefore the other NCOs and I laughed when our sergeant major told us, in a drunken moment (and an unusual one, because liquor was generally reserved for officers; enlisted men, including sergeants, got beer), that he had slept with men. Mike Powers was in the regular Marine Corps, a professional soldier; he had served in Nicaragua, Haiti and on Gibraltar. It was on Gibraltar that he had, by his soused account, violated Chapter Two Specification Seventeen almost nightly. His lovers had been civilians, he said, some of them distinguished European civilians.”

Powers told them that when he retired, he planned to write a book called Famous Cocks I Have Sucked.

“We didn’t take him seriously, partly because in the Marine Corps there was a constant rivalry to see who could be coarsest,” Manchester wrote. “His behavior was in many ways regrettable, but always in macho ways which, we thought, were the exact opposite of homosexuality. Six feet two, blond and virile, he was heavily muscled and deep voiced.”

Powers was tough and brave, but he had a flaw in combat. “Our strutting, bullying, powerfully built sergeant major just couldn’t stand the strain of concentrated enemy shellfire,” Manchester said. “He could take small-arms fire, and once he demolished a Nambu light-machine-gun nest with a hand grenade. But artillery turned his bowels to water.”

And so one night, when the firing stopped after a sustained attack from 81-millimeter mortar shells, Powers cracked up. The Marines knew that the silence was a tactic to draw them out in the open so they could relieve themselves, at which point they’d be caught in a fresh fusillade. Powers began ranting and yelling and ordering a charge that would have gotten them all killed, so Manchester was forced to relieve Powers and get him to a battalion aid station.

Manchester never saw Powers again, but he learned Powers’ fate much later, when Manchester, bedridden in a naval hospital, heard the officer of the day describe the court martial of one Michael J. Powers. Powers had been caught having oral sex with the young medical corpsman who had soothed and befriended him when Manchester left him at the aid station. And he’d been sentenced to 85 years in Portsmouth Naval Prison for it.

Going to War with Gary Cooper

“War monuments have never stirred me,” wrote author, historian and World War II Pacific combat veteran William Manchester in his memoir Goodbye, Darkness. “They are like the reconstructed buildings at Colonial Williamsburg, or elaborate reproductions of great paintings; no matter how deft the execution, they are essentially counterfeit.

“In addition, they are usually beautiful and in good taste, whereas combat is neither. Before the war I thought that Hemingway, by stripping battle narratives of their ripe prose, was describing the real thing. Afterward I realized that he had simply replaced traditional overstatement with romantic understatement.

“War is never understated. Combat as I saw it was exorbitant, outrageous, excruciating and above all tasteless, perhaps because the number of fighting men who had read Hemingway or Remarque was a fraction of those who had seen B movies about bloodshed. If a platoon leader had watched Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Errol Flynn, Victor McLaglen, John Wayne or Gary Cooper leap recklessly about, he was likely to follow his role model.

“In crises, most people are imitative. Soldiers received ‘Dear John’ letters copied from those quoted in the press. The minority who avoid Hollywood paradigms were, like me, people who watched fewer B movies than we had read books. That does not mean we were better soldiers and citizens. We certainly weren’t braver. I do think that our optics were clearer, however — that what we saw was closer to the truth because we weren’t looking through MGM or RKO prisms."

William Manchester: Recalling the Red and Ragged

“War is literally unreasonable,” wrote the author, biographer and historian William Manchester in his 1979 memoir Goodbye, Darkness.

“Today’s youth cannot understand it; mine, I suppose, was the last generation to believe audacity in combat is a virtue. And I don’t know why we believed it. The mystery troubled me and baffled me, for some of my actions in the early 1940s make no sense to me now.

William Manchester

“On Okinawa, on Saturday, June 2, 1945, I suffered a superficial gunshot wound just above my right kneecap and was ship back to a field hospital. Mine was what we called a ‘million-dollar wound.’ Although I could hear the Long Toms in the distance, I was warm, dry and safe. My machismo was intact; I was simply hors de combat.

“The next day I heard that my regiment was going to land behind enemy lines on Oroku Penisula. I left my cot, jumped hospital, hitchhiked to the front and made the landing on Monday.

“Why had I returned to terror? To be sure, I had been gung ho at the outbreak of war. But I had quickly become a summer soldier and a sunshine patriot. I was indifferent toward rank, and I certainly sought no glory. ‘We owe God a death,” wrote Shakespeare. So we do, but I hoped God would extend my line of credit indefinitely. I was very young. I hadn’t published a short story, fathered a child or even slept with a girl. And because I am possessed, like most writers, by an intense curiosity, I wanted to stick around until, at the very least, I knew which side had won the war.

“So, craftily, I became the least intrepid of warriors, a survivor, not a hero, more terrier than lion. If there was a coward’s way, I took it. The word hero, to me, is redolent of Nelson Eddy in his Smokey Bear hat, with Jeanette McDonald shrieking in his ear, or of John Wayne being booed in a Hawaiian hospital by an audience of wounded Marines from Iwo Jima and Okinawa, men who had macho acts, in a phrase of the day, up their asses to their armpits.

“To be sure, I was not an inept fighter. I was lean and hard and tough and proud. I had tremendous reserves of stamina. I never bolted. I was a crack shot. I had a shifty, shambling run, and a lovely eye for defilade — for what the Duke of Wellington called ‘dead ground,’ that is, a spot shielded from flat-trajectory enemy fire by a natural obstacle, like a tree or a rock — coupled with a good sense of direction and a better sense of ground. To this day, I check emergency exits immediately after registering in a hotel, and in bars you will find me occupying a corner table, with my flanks secure.

“But that was the sum of my military skills. I had walked through the valley of the shadow of death and had been terribly frightened. Afterward, those few of us in my unit who had survived received a document from Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal citing us for ‘gallantry,’ ‘valor,’ ‘tenacity’ and ‘extraordinary heroism against enemy Japanese forces,’ but those shining words didn’t really apply to me. Indeed, at times it seemed that they applied to no one except the dead. I agreed with Hemingway: ‘Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.’

“For us, they had been Buna and Suribachi; the Kokoda Trail and Tarawa; the First Marine Division and the Eleventh Airborne; the Kumusi and the Asa Kawa; December 7, 1941, and V-J Day. I honored them while hating the whole red and ragged business of war.”

Breakfast in Yokohama

MacArthur arrives in Japan on Aug. 30, 1945.

Kamakura's 50-foot Buddha

On Aug. 30, 1945, Gen. Douglas MacArthur flew to Okinawa in a C-54, passing over the serene whiteness of Mount Fujiyama, Kamakura’s 50-foot bronze Buddha and a newly surrendered nation.

His officers weren’t entirely sure about that. Roving bands of young diehards wearing white bands around their heads were engaging in violent clashes in the cities down there, and who knew what the humiliated Japanese troops might do? But when the officers started to strap on handguns, MacArthur said no.

“Take them off,” MacArthur said. “If they intend to kill us, sidearms will be useless. And nothing will impress them like a show of absolute fearlessness. If they don’t know they’re licked, this will convince them.”

Landing, they were driven past rubble and ruin on a dusty road lined by 30,000 Japanese infantrymen, their backs turned deferentially and as a security measure. The generals settled in to Yokohama’s New Grand Hotel, where they were served steaks.

“(Gen. Courtney) Whitney thought MacArthur’s might be poisoned and suggested that a Japanese taste it first,” wrote biographer William Manchester. “MacArthur laughed and shook his head: it was good meat and he didn’t want to share it with anyone. The gesture did not pass unnoticed. The hotel staff had anticipated Whitney’s suspicion and expected a tasting of the General’s food. (Hotel owner Yozo) Nomura reappeared at his table to express his gratitude for this demonstration of ‘great trust.’ He and his employees, he said, were ‘honored beyond belief.’

“MacArthur was obviously delighted with this little speech. His officers wondered why. It seemed a very small matter. But the General knew that word of everything he said and did would quickly spread throughout the country. He was determined that the occupation be benign from the outset.

“Moreover, remembering his tour of duty in Germany after the 1918 Armistice, he realized that in a war-torn, defeated country, food would be at a premium. He sensed that the acquisition of these steaks had been no small matter, that all Japan must be hungry, a surmise which was confirmed at breakfast the next morning, after the commander of the 11^th Airborne ruefully reported that his division had searched all night and found exactly one egg for the Supreme Commander’s breakfast.

“MacArthur immediately issued an order at odds with the whole history of conquering armies in Asia. Occupation troops were forbidden to consume local victuals; they would eat only their own rations.

“An hour later, he canceled the martial law and curfew degrees (Gen. Robert) Eichelberger had imposed on the city. The first step in the reformation of Japan, he said, would be an exhibition of generosity and compassion by the occupying power.”

Gen. Douglas MacArthur: An Appetite for Danger

MacArthur wades ashore at Leyte

During World War II, Gen. Douglas MacArthur regularly exposed himself to sniper fire, machine gun attacks and enemy bombs, scorning bomb shelters and offering a distinctive target.

That calm bravado — no doubt related to his vanity and heightened sense of drama— prompted at least one psychiatrist to render a snap diagnosis of “suicidal.”

At Brunei Bay in the Philippines, MacArthur was leading his nervous officers along a beach road battlefield when they came across the freshly slain bodies of two Japanese soldiers.

“An Army photographer appeared, hoping to take a picture of the General and the bodies,” wrote biographer William Manchester. “MacArthur refused, and the cameraman squared away to snap the two corpses. Just at the bulb flashed, the photographer fell with a sniper’s bullet in his shoulder.

“Sir Leslie Morhead, the corps commander, hurried up and said they had reached the front line. MacArthur protested: ‘But I see some Australian soldiers fully a hundred yards ahead.’ Sir Leslie said: ‘General, that is only a forward patrol, and even now it is under heavy fire. You cannot go beyond this point without extreme hazard. The enemy is right in front of it.’ MacArthur said, ‘Let’s go forward.’ Sir Leslie stepped aside and told one of the American aides, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a commander-in-chief acting as the point.’

“The General started to pace toward the Japanese, but (Gen. George C.) Kenney decided to intervene. They had found the enemy’s outpost position, he told MacArthur, and ‘if he wanted my vote, it was for allowing the infantry to do the job they came ashore for.’ Besides, he continued, the captain of the Boise had invited them to dinner, and it would be ‘extremely discourteous to keep dinner waiting when, after all, we were just guests.’ Capping his argument, he reminded the General that the cruiser’s skipper had promised them chocolate ice cream that evening.

“’All right, George,’ MacArthur said, smiling and turning back toward the ship. ‘I wouldn’t have you miss that ice cream for anything.’

“His craving for danger was unappeased, however; the next day they landed on the other side of Brunei Bay. Hearing gunfire coming from the direction of a nearby airfield, they ‘headed,’ in Kenney’s words, ‘for more trouble.’

“Reaching the edge of the landing strip, the General said, ‘Let’s go on,’ but then an Australian colonel stepped out of the bush and barred the way, brusquely telling the commander in chief that he and his entourage were an unwelcome distraction.

“Kenney writes: ‘He was not a bit awed at MacArthur’s five stars and, much to my gratification, refused to let us go forward another inch.”

The Sordid Telepathy of Douglas MacArthur

MacArthur with Sutherland in Brisbane during World War II

During the Pacific war, Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s chief of staff, Gen. Richard K. Sutherland, had a married mistress. MacArthur, concerned about a scandal in the press, ordered Sutherland to get rid of her.

“MacArthur had told his chief of staff that after Hollandia, the round-heeled Australian captain must return to Brisbane, that under no circumstances could should cross the equator,” wrote biographer William Manchester. Sutherland secretly defied him, building a cottage for the woman on Leyte during MacArthur’s invasion of the Philippines.

MacArthur’s other subordinate officers were nervous about breaking the news to him. Telepathy, or perhaps synchronicity, solved their problem. As the woman became increasingly demanding, Dr. Roger Egeberg decided something should be done.

“The doctor crossed Santo Nino Street from the staff headquarters to the Price house and found MacArthur in a rocking chair on the veranda,” Manchester wrote. “Sitting on another chair, Egeberg tried to think how best to broach the subject. He asked perfunctorily about (MacArthur’s wife) Jean and then sat in silence, trying mental telepathy, concentrating on the cottage dweller’s name. Presently the General turned t him and asked, ‘Doc, whatever happened to that woman?’ The doctor spoke her name aloud. ‘That’s the one.’ Egeberg said, ‘She’s 10 mile down the coast. Larry just talked to her.’ The General’s jaw sagged and then set in a grim line. He said: ‘Get Sutherland!’”

The doctor did as he was told, leaving Sutherland in MacArthur’s company. On the way out, he heard MacArthur shout “You goddamned son of a bitch!” and various other choice phrases.

The woman was packed off to Brisbane, but Sutherland apparently couldn’t resist her charms. He pleased toothache as an excuse for joining her there.

“When he returned, the General’s attitude was frigid,” Manchester wrote. “Never again were they on intimate terms.”

They Laughed All the Way to Pearl Harbor

The persistent sneering devil of American racism led to a grave military error in the Pacific.

“(A)s the 1930s drew to a close, most American officers in the Philippines regarded conflict between the United States and Dai Nippon (literally Great Japan, as in Great Britain) as inevitable,” wrote biographer William Manchester in American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964. “But few of them doubted a swift U.S. victory.

Japanese propaganda art from World War II

“Even MacArthur was misled by racial chauvinism; when he saw the skill with which Japanese warplanes were flown in the first days of the war, he concluded that the pilots must be white men.

“The Japanese, Americans agreed, were a comical race. They wrote backward and read backward. They built their houses from the roof down and pulled, instead of pushing, their saws. Their baseball announcers gave the full count as ‘two and three.’ Department-store bargain basements were on the top floor.

“Japanese women gave men gifts on Saint Valentine’s Day. Papers were stapled in the upper right-hand corner. To open their locks, you had to turn the key to the left. If they fell in the mud, they laughed; telling you of grave personal misfortunes, they grinned. Japanese murderers apologized to the victims’ families for messing up the house, and the Japanese host who received you into his home with exquisite courtesy might, upon meeting you in the street, shove you rudely into the gutter.

“They were stocky, bandy-legged and buck-toothed. Their civilians wore rumpled hats, dark alpaca suits and tinted glasses in public. Their soldiers suited up in uniforms resembling badly wrapped brown paper parcels. The notion that they could shoot straight — not to mention lick red-blooded Americans — was regarded in Manila as preposterous.” But, as Manchester observed, “Really it was the Americans who were comic, or, considering what lay ahead, tragicomic.”

How to Succeed in the Pentagon (By Trying Very, Very Hard)

Gen Douglas MacArthur in 1930

When it came to crawling up the butts of superiors who were in a position to do him some good, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was determined to be second to none. MacArthur could have put J. Pierrepont Finch to shame in his shamelessness.

“He had been carefully feeding the hungry ego of the new president’s secretary of war, Patrick J. Hurley,” noted biographer William Manchester. “Seeing his chance when Hurley sent the Senate a routine communication on the Philippines, the General sent him an oleaginous missive:

‘I have just read in the local papers your letter … and I cannot refrain from expressing to you the unbounded admiration it has caused me. It is the most comprehensive and statesmanlike paper that has ever been presented with reference to this complex and perplexing problem. At one stroke, it has clarified issues which have perplexed and embarrassed statesmen for the past 30 years. If nothing else had ever been written on the subject, your treatise would be complete and absolute. It leaves nothing to be said and has brought confidence and hope out of the morass of chaos and confusion which has existed in the minds of millions of people. It is the most statesmanlike utterance that has emanated from the American Government in many decades and renews in the hearts of many of us our confirmed faith in American principles and ideals. You have done a great and courageous piece of work and I am sure that the United States intends even greater things for you in the future. Please accept my heartiest congratulations not only for yourself personally but the great nation to which we both belong.’

“For a while he heard nothing. … But the administration was giving serious thought to a successor for (Army Chief of Staff Charles P.) Summerall, who would retire in the fall of 1930, and MacArthur’s name was being discussed seriously. Hurley had at first balked, arguing that a man who ‘couldn’t hold his woman’ shouldn’t be Chief of Staff. Since then, however, MacArthur’s remarkable letter had impressed the secretary of war with its wisdom and insight.”

MacArthur got the appointment he so keenly wanted — but not, of course, without pretending that he hesitated to take the job. He only finally and reluctantly accepted the post at the urging of his dear mother, or so he said.

Source: William Manchester,  “American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964”

And Death Was Dead Ahead

Douglas MacArthur at a French chateau in 1918

During World War I, Douglas MacArthur, then a brigadier general, was provided plenty of chances to test his courage.

“The 42^nd had been trying, with little success, to advance northward from the Ourcq to the Vesle, which runs roughly parallel to it. A Boche deserter reported that the enemy was pulling back, but there was no sign of it.

“In the small hours of Friday morning, MacArthur crawled into no-man’s-land with an aide: ‘The dead were so think in spots that we tumbled over them. There must have been at least 2,000 of those sprawled bodies. I identified the insignia of six of the best German divisions. The stench was suffocating. Not a tree was standing. The moans and cries of wounded men sounded everywhere. Sniper bullets sung like the buzzing of angry bees.’”

“Abruptly a Very flare blazed overhead, and he and the aide hit the dirt. In the flickering light, MacArthur saw, dead ahead, ‘three Germans — a lieutenant pointing with outstretched arm, a sergeant crouched over a machine gun, a corporal feeding a bandolier of cartridges to the weapon. I held my breath waiting for the burst, but there was nothing. The seconds ticked by, but still nothing. We waited until we could wait no longer.’

“Watching the Germans’ position, the aide ‘shifted his poised grenade to the other hand and reached for his flashlight. They had not moved. They were never to move. They were dead, all dead — the lieutenant with shrapnel through his heart, the sergeant with his belly blown into his back, the corporal with his spine where his head should have been.’”

— William Manchester,  American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964

Bravery and Bribery

Arthur McArthur as an 18-year-old adjutant

Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s father, Captain Arthur MacArthur, was a Union Army Civil War veteran of conspicuous bravery. He went on to become part of that western cavalry that later came riding to the rescue in the horse-opera movies, but was actually engaged in the steady, colonial displacement of the Native American tribes.

“As Douglas told the story late in life, his father was serving on a military court in New Orleans when a cotton broker, urgently needing the loan of army transport facilities, attempted to suborn him. The bribe was to be a large sum of cash, which was left on his desk, and a night with an exquisite Southern girl. Wiring Washington the details, Arthur concluded, ‘I am depositing the money with the Treasury of the United States and request immediate relief from this command. They are getting close to my price.’”

— William Manchester, American Caesar.