School of War - Ep. 7: John McManus on the U.S. Army in the Pacific during World War II

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Biography John McManus is the Curators' Distinguished Professor of U.S. military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. McManus completed his doctorate in military history at the University of Tennessee and is the author of more than a dozen books. His latest, Island Infernos: The US Army's Pacific War Odyssey, 1944, is the second installment of a trilogy detailing the U.S. Army's role in the Pacific theater during World War II. Times 01:12 - Introduction 03:38 - Misperceptions of the Army and Marines in Guadalcanal 08:44 - The Army's role in the Pacific 12:46 - Geography of the Pacific and dividing the theater between General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz 18:30 - Island hopping and the turning point in the Pacific theater 22:26 - The infantry's experience in combat 23:52 - The Pearl Harbor Conference and the endgame of war in the Pacific 31:55 - General Joseph Stilwell and China 38:39 - Prisoners of War in Japan 41:32 - The legacy of the War in the Pacific Recorded November 23, 2021

Ask someone what they know about America's ground campaigns and island hopping in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor, and they are likely to tell you something about the Marine Corps. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, and the record of valor and victory achieved by the six divisions fielded by the Marines in the Pacific during World War II is remarkable. But the U.S. Army was there, too, and was in fact fighting with more than three times the number of combat divisions that the Marines brought to the fight, engaged in vicious jungle and urban combat in places like Guadalcanal, the Philippines, and scores of other critical but largely forgotten engagements.

The Army's story in the Pacific is also one of victory and valor. Let's talk about it today. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7,1941, a date which will live in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. and the people who not these buildings down. We'll fight on the beaches.

We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. Today, I'm delighted to welcome John McManus. He's the curator's distinguished professor of military history at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

He's a military historian, historian of the Second World War, most recently the author of Island Infernos, which is the second volume of a work chronicling the story of the U.S. Army in the Pacific in World War II. Sir, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm delighted to have you. Maybe we could just start by having you talk a little bit about yourself and where you're from and how you became interested in military history and in the Second World War in particular, which I think has sort of constituted the bulk of your research lately, correct?

That's correct. Yeah. You know, I'm from St. Louis originally. And what I wanted to be as a kid actually was a sportscaster. I was very passionately interested in baseball and hockey. And so I went to the University of Missouri for journalism, for sports journalism. But as a kind of subplot to all this, I was always very interested, you know, even as a young kid in World War II and read pretty much anything I could get my hands on. I was very influenced by Robert Lecky, who you may remember was first.

featured in the miniseries, the Pacific, who had served as a Marine in the Pacific. And, of course, his personal story was moving to me. But more than that, you know, all the books he wrote, including some for kids. You know, what really stood out to me is I just read as much as I could on World War II was that it seemed like in a lot of books, the average soldiers experience kind of got overlooked or was opaque somehow or not really that clear. And I thought to myself over time that they're not. needed to be a lot more understanding of this, that this was a very powerful and important part of

the war and a part of our American military experience as a whole. And so in college, I took any history course I could. And it finally occurred to me. I'm not the swiftest guy. I mean, it occurred to me over a couple of years. You know, I probably ought to be doing history rather than than sports. And so I decided to go to grad school part time and was working in a bookstore part time as well. Just to see, if this was the right path and it worked out really well. I loved it and I decided as long as I was going to be an historian, I felt that the most important topic I could study was something of the soldier's history and experience. So Island Infernoes and the, I assume it's going to be a trilogy of which it will be the middle part. You know, it's not strictly a history of the war in the

Pacific. It's the story of the Army, the U.S. Army in the Pacific. And you point out something in the book that the role of the army is kind of eclipsed in popular memory by the story of the Marines. And, you know, you see in popular culture today, you know, the Pacific, the counter, the mini series you just made reference to, which is the counterpart to a band of brothers in the army in Europe. It focuses not just on a marine company, but it sort of skips back and forth across all the different marine regiments. Recently, somebody said to me, they asked me, had I seen that great movie, the thin red line, about the Marines on Guadalcanal, which of course you know, it's not at all the case.

is the Army on the Canal in that story and James Jones's novel. So my question is, you know, what happened? Why is it? I mean, the Marines have, of course, superior public relations skills. Is that really the whole story? What's going on here? That's a big part of the story. And it's funny to hear you say that about the thin red line because I show that movie in class and a class I teach on Americans in combat. And I have the students write film reviews. And sometimes in the film reviews, they refer to these soldiers as Marines, and I'm just immediately on them. Like, no, no. And I try and tell them, well, yes, the Marines are a big part of Guadalcanal, but that's not what we're looking at here in this film. But yeah, so what I think is

happen, certainly the Marine Corps is always better at preserving and telling its history in a way because it has to be. You know, it's smaller, it's distinct. It's part of the legend and lore and I think there's a sort of force multiplier of understanding for every Marine where he or she fits in that larger legacy. And I really think that's great. But the Army just doesn't have to or need to do that as well. And so I think that's part of it. But also, when we look at the Pacific War, a lot of times it's easier to just say, okay, let's take on Tarawa. You know, it's a very dramatic, quick story, very bloody battle.

And it is one of the very, very few pretty much exclusively marine battles. And so the war is so large, so vast, so brutal and savage that I think sometimes it's easier to just kind of be a passenger and say, let's look at Tarawa, let's look at this part of Guadalcanal, let's look at Saipan and then Iwo and then we're done kind of thing. And there's a much wider war. 1.8 million American ground soldiers served, Army ground soldiers served in the Pacific Asia Theater. they are the ones who do the lead in most of the ground fighting by design. The Corps just wasn't that big. So in my series, what I try and make case to mention is I'm not at all denigrating the Marine Corps. It's actually really the opposite because when you see that larger context, you're like,

the Marines had an incredible impact. And obviously the valor is without question. But you also then see them as a smaller group almost in some. support of these larger army operations, but also, too, I think quite significantly, there's a great lesson for today that the two ground-oriented services fights shoulder to shoulder and are designed to do that and have a bond and much in common. And I really think that gets lost. And I think that that's one thing for a present-day soldier or Marine that's very important to understand. How would you frame it? Was inter-service tension more the exception than the rule,

or was it that the tension was at the higher levels? And at the level of the actual warfighter, it was less significant? Yes, that the actual warfighter was much less significant. And Saipan is the best example. The soldiers and Marines who fought side by side almost universally had deep respect for one another. And really, I argue in this book, and I think I'm at variance with some historians of the Pacific War, the Marines and the soldiers fought similarly. There's always this idea, the Marines go in with a quick-hitting doctrine,

and they're willing to go and take chances with frontal assaults because they want to take islands quickly and free up the ships. And yes, that's part of Marine Corps doctrine. I understand that. But at the same time, the reality was the reality. And you can throw as many people at the Umer Brogall on Pelal as you want or at Death Valley and Saipan as you want. I don't care how valorous you are.

You're going to get cut down and wage. and this was happening to Marines, just like it was to the Army. What ends up happening in a practical sense is they fight very similarly with combined arms and incremental and using all the naval support. And so, yes, the tension tended to be at the senior level, most notably, of course, between Hollinsmith and Rausmith, you know, during the famous Saipan incident, and institutionally to some extent. And so sometimes you're going to see people at a lower level pick up on that tension.

and then, you know, then hurl epithets back and forth or something. But by and large, what I found was was more in common than otherwise. So let's step back for a bit and go to the theater level and give folks a bit of an orientation to the war and the Army's role between it. So you have three main characters at that level that you're following. You have MacArthur, Nimitz, and Stillwell. And they're responsible for sort of the three main chunks. of what is itself a vast war.

The war in the Pacific is itself, you know, this incredibly complicated bloody struggle. So let's go through the three of them and maybe start with MacArthur. And maybe you could, we could frame things, you know, your most recent book is sort of the middle phase of the war in 44. But talk about General MacArthur, where he was on Pearl Harbor, who he is and how the war starts for him. Yeah, MacArthur, of course, has been through a heck of a lot.

You know, he's the sion of a general. and a Civil War hero, Arthur MacArthur. He, you know, obviously he was a West Pointer. He loves the Philippines, has served there, you know, as a young officer. It was a war hero from World War I. He had been the youngest superintendent of West Point, you know, as a young brigadier general after World War I. He had become Army Chief of Staff. And this is what's unique about MacArthur in relation to every other American commander in the war.

He had been chief of staff, which obviously had been the number one position, and then he had become a field commander later. And the way this happens is when he's approaching the end of his chief of staff term, he's approached by his old friend Manuel Kazon, the president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, which is about to get its independence, to try and help transition them to create an army and a defense force that the new nation would need. And so he goes to the Philippines in the second half of the 1930s to help stand up this new Filipino and American-supported army. And that's where we are when World War II breaks out. And of course, they're nowhere near prepared, nowhere near. And so the army he's leading at that point in 41 or 42 is unique in American history in that it's a colonial army. It's about one quarter to maybe one-third American and the rest Filipino.

And, of course, we all know that he faces disaster in the Philippines. Roosevelt orders him out. And, you know, his great mission, of course, almost a messianic mission from that point on is to get back to the Philippines and liberate the archipelago. So almost everything MacArthur does from that spring in 1942 on is designed with that in mind. And he finds himself in the muck of New Guinea and other smaller islands in the South Pacific, you know, trying to get by with what he thinks is very thread, very resources and fighting alongside the Australians and using Australia as a base, which is for the early phase of the Pacific War, every bit as important as a base and an ally as Britain was in the European theater.

So you're seeing that play out, and he's constantly worried, you know, in what is obviously kind of a naval-dominated theater for obvious reasons, that Nimitz is going to usurp most of his resources and influence, and he sees him as a rival. And MacArthur, of course, as you probably know, is a massive ego maniac whose ego would fit in the grand canon on a good day, maybe. You know, he's just this fascinating figure because he's incredibly self-promoting.

He's really troubling because he's also political, running a Subrosa campaign for president in 1943 and 44, you know, but he's also honorable in some ways and correct and polite, and he's very valorous. And yet he also lies and distorts about his courage. and valor through his communiquees. So for an historian, he's great fodder. He's a fascinating guy. So he views by 1944 Nimitz is sort of his key rival, you know, for priority and resources and influence.

And Nimitz has this kind of parallel theater, island hopping in what is generally the central part of the Pacific. We talk for a second about the geography of the Pacific as it appears. to, you know, say the chiefs of staff and military strategists at the time. You know, today, the Asia Pacific or the Indo-Pacific is much in the news. And when we think about China and the PLA threat, we talk about the first island chain, the second island chain. And there's kind of a common language right now about how the region is structured, but kind of from the point of view of China, right, as the center of gravity and the adversary.

So just talk about how the world looked in the Pacific to the chiefs of staff. How did they divide up the area? Why did it make sense to have MacArthur in charge? of one part, Nimitz and another. How are they looking at it? Yeah, so this is one third of the world's surface of ocean and island and continent, you know, the Asian continent. So it's so vast that it's hard to imagine that you could have any one individual really commanding over it. And of course, you have the sort of political aspect of it interceding as well. China is its own entity. And you could not possibly have

an American or allied commander in China who's also going to be able to have any influence on the South Pacific, say, or whatever. So, yeah, General Stillwell is kind of doing his thing in China. And at the same time, the Navy and the Army have kind of had this uneasy compromise. MacArthur would love to control the whole Pacific Theater. And the Navy would love to control the whole Pacific Theater, too, probably through the person of Nimitz. And in the end, they kind of just decide to have this uneasy kind of standoff compromise,

in part because of geography, but I think more so because of because of, of the realities of inter-service politics there. So what's interesting is you have all along through World War II, the Hearst Empire, the media empire, William Randolph Hurst, you'll notice his newspapers are constantly lobbying for the whole theater to be put under MacArthur. And so they're running any stories they can to make the Marine Corps look bad, make the Navy look backward or incapable of running the theater, as if they wouldn't know how to run a theater in which about two-thirds of it is ocean, you know.

But this was the sort of kind of tension that existed at the time. And so the Joint Chiefs are looking at this and saying, okay, what's the best way we can divvy up this pie and still live with ourselves? Ernie King, the Chief of Naval Operations, hates MacArthur with a passion and will never allow him to control the bulk of the fleet. So he's going to make sure there's an independent naval-dominated theater under, of course, Chester Nimitz. And so the Army Chiefs and staff, George Marshall, realizes this, respects it, and understands that probably this is the best we can do. But you can't necessarily remove MacArthur or take a theater away from him because you're going to have tremendous blowback, certainly on the Hearst side, on the Republican side, where MacArthur is very popular. and, of course, you know, you have to take the Army's feelings into consideration since they're contributing a massive amount to the war effort, of course, too. So the way they split up the theaters is a kind of a compromise.

And MacArthur ends up in control what's called the Southwest Pacific Area or Swapa and Nimitz with what's generally just called the Central Pacific. Let's talk for a minute about Nimitz then in the Central Pacific area. He seems to some extent to have a sort of different operational concept from McCarthur. To what extent is that true, I suppose? And, you know, what drives that? Well, of course, Nimitz is going to think as a naval thinker first. And so he's thinking about where he can base fleets. He's thinking about the kind of airfields he needs in order to cover his ships.

And he's not dealing with land surfaces quite as great in size as MacArthur is, particularly in New Guinea. And eventually later in the Philippines, of course, too. So Nimitz tends to coalesce his strategic thinking around the idea of island hopping. And MacArthur does some of the same. Don't to get me wrong. But Nimitz more so just simply because of the geography. Temperamentally, he's very different than MacArthur. MacArthur's sensitive and vanglorious and dramatic and all these things.

And Nimitz is a very low-key person who really can't quite understand why people get upset. Emmett's had always been like that. He's just very chill, very thoughtful, very circumspect, but not a pushover. And so what I compare him to in the book is, like, he's, because he controls, you know, enormous, powerful naval resource by 1944, the most powerful fleet the world had ever seen, you know. And I compare him to this kind of gentle temperament German shepherd dealing with this little beagle, MacArthur, who's constantly yapping at his heels, you know. And Nimitz is like, why must we be this way? You know, why don't we work together? And they eventually do. The MacArthur's credit, he eventually does reach out to Nimitz and they start to coordinate

and work better together. And, you know, but there were, of course, plenty times when MacArthur was tense or was railing against Nimitz, not in person, but, but, you know, with his staff or whatever. And I think that it's fortunate for the allies in the United States in particular that they have Nimitz that they have this kind of even keel personality because if they didn't, you really would have ended up with maybe say a naval commander with the temperament of someone like Holland Smith or somebody like that. You would have end up with a guy who's constantly budding heads with MacArthur because it would have brought out the worst in MacArthur in response of this rivalry. So I think

Nimitz's value is just kind of off the charts in that regard. Your book chronicles, we'll dive into the operational level here for a second. Your book chronicles in the Marshall. islands early in 44, a kind of a disagreement about how to go about island hopping, whether to, as it were, go one at a time or whether or not the process can be accelerated in which Nimitz takes a strong view and seems to be vindicated. So talk about a bit, talk about how island hopping works and how the concept accelerates in 44. Yeah, island hopping is all predicated on, you know, which island should we try to take and which should we bypass. And those are tough decisions because you need good intel and they don't always have good intel.

Most of it is aerial reconnaissance or submarine photos. There's not a lot of like on the ground sense of what the size of a Japanese garrison would be or what their capability could be, you know, and what kind of fleets they could call upon and whatever else. And so, you know, you're kind of making educated guesses as this thing goes forward. And so it's very difficult for Nimitz to, you know, parse all that out. When it comes to the Marshall Islands, he decides that we can invade several hundred miles farther west than all of his staff and pretty much all of his commanders are in favor of because they think you're going to need to do incrementally. Let's go to the Eastern Marshals. Let's capture key airfields and then we'll incrementally move forward.

But, you know, Nimitz wants to move the timetable forward too, just like MacArthur does in New Guinea. And he doesn't want to get bogged down. And so he has to make these bold decisions. And he does in this case. And he basically tells his naval commander, Admiral Turner, you know, either you can do this or I'll get somebody else. And he tells the same thing to Holland Smith, who is nominally his ground commander. And eventually they get on board. The invasion of Quaseline and Roy Nemur, the 7th Infantry Division for the Army at Quageline, and then the 4th Marine Division at

at Roy Numer. And both of them are done with their battles within about four to five days or so. Both, I think, really well-thought battles. What's amazing about this is that that accelerates Nimitz's timetable by about 16 to 20 weeks. And it allows then Nimitz's forces in the summer, 1944, to get to the Marianas, which is really the key campaign for that phase of the Pacific War. I would compare it in terms of a pivot point for the Pacific War, it's like what Normandy is for the war against Germany. So what is it about the Marianas that makes the turning point?

Because you have these three major islands that are going to be just ideal for basing, Saipan, Guam, and Tinian. And of course, the case of Guam, that was an American colony, so there's a redemptive aspect to it. But it has a tremendous naval language that is going to be great for, you know, the subsequent push farther north to places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa. but the most significant thing about the Mariana's is it's going to provide you with air bases for your heavy bombers from which you can bomb the Japanese home islands. Once you have that, now you've brought the war to the Japanese home front. And, of course, this is going to happen on a pretty wide scale. Eventually, this is going to lead to fire bombings.

And, of course, there's another island called Tinian, where the plane that carries the atomic bomb, Sally's Ford. So that is really like the inner ring of Japan's defenses. And those are some of the largest battles of the Pacific War, you know, air, land and sea in the Mariana's in summer in 1944. When Japan loses, now the Japanese home front is directly at peril. And it also leads kind of an open door for McCarthy's forces to help return to the Philippines too, which I would argue the Philippines are the nexus of the entire American War in the Pacific in terms of where we actually fight and where we lose people. And what is the fighting like for the average, the American Joe, I'll try to speak army here? Talk about the experience of the infantrymen.

The experience of the infantrymen uniformly in this war is, in terms of combat, savage, brutal combat to the finish, typically. And I think this is one of the reasons why popularly, I think we tend to like to focus a little more on Europe than the Pacific, because the Pacific War is to some extent a war of cultural hatred and racial hatred. one of the reasons I'm studying it, and I think the Army's story in the Pacific is so important, is the way the combat is thought, tends to characterize what we're going to have ever since, much more so than the war against Germany. And an example I'd give you, Japanese soldiers deliberately try to kill American medics. They don't respect the Geneva Convention and all this business, and that's going to be true in Korea. It's going to be true in Vietnam. So as an infantryman, I mean, you are dealing with. with an opponent who will generally fight to the death, who is quite tenacious on defense when he

digs in because of his determination of fight to the death. He has significant firepower at his disposal. You're probably dealing with the worst of conditions. Heat, mud, disease. I mean, the Pacific is just a rough go, whether we're talking about a Marine infantryman or an Army infantryman. It's much, much the same experience. In 1944, things are pretty much seating well, relatively speaking for the Americans. And then there's this conference in Pearl Harbor, to which MacArthur, Nimitz, others are summoned to, ultimately FDR presides. Talk about the debate that has had there about essentially how to design the end game here or something. Maybe the end game, maybe the stage right before the end game. I'm curious to know how you would think of that and how the debate

comes out. Yeah, I think it's probably something of the stage before the end game, but vital to the end game. And the Pearl Harbor Conference, as it's often called, is another gift to historians in the sense that you know, you have the key characters of the war, but also obviously the Pacific War converging there. FDR, of course, travels all the way to Pearl Harbor, and he's not a well man. He's there with Admiral William Leahy, who was really his key aide, his chief of staff, the first chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs before they even called that. And so he's important. And then obviously Nimitz and then MacArthur is summoned and actually follows an order to come back and meet with these folks. And he's not happy about it at all. But once he gets there, he kind of just dives in. And so his messianic mission is we must go back to the Philippines, you know, the whole argument.

We must liberate 17 million of our friends and allies. And if we don't, America's position in Asia is forever compromised. And, you know, so it's all this grandiose kind of rhetoric. The Navy at that point, through the person of Nimitz, is arguing to bypass the Philippines in favor of what was called Formosa then, but now is Taiwan. And they're thinking there is that, well, we'll get bogged down in the Philippines. It'll be horrendous fighting. We'll pour resources of people in there. And it's not the direct line to Japan.

that Taiwan or Formosa is closer as a stepping stone to Japan and so we'll be able to perhaps end the war sooner. Now this was King's vision and Nimitz is sort of arguing for it, but a bit half-heartedly because he also kind of sees MacArthur's point. And it's a very genial kind of conference in which they kind of hash these issues out and the upshot of it is that MacArthur more or less gets what he, wants, which is some level of return to the Philippines. And what I mentioned in Ireland Inferno's is he's like a, he's in the aftermath of the

Pearl Harbor Conference. He's like a salesman who thinks he's got the order and then comes on with the full court press to get precisely. Once he's got that foot in the door, he's coming into your house. And so you see these like policy memos that follow. and these Swapa staff studies about Formosa versus the Philippines and all this, and you can imagine what they say, you know. And so MacArthur just constantly bombards Washington saying,

yes, I can do the Philippines, and it's going to be not at much cost. I'm going to be able to, and it's like this hard sales pitch that in retrospect is just promising way too much. But he gets what he wants. He gets an invasion of Laité and, of course, eventually an invasion of Luzon, and they're never going to invade Formosa. And that's probably for the best, because it was a, a big, unfriendly island. It would have taken a lot to subdue it, and it would have been very hard to support the operations logistically. You know, sometimes you hear this debate framed

in terms of sort of, as you put it, MacArthur's messianic vision on the one hand and a kind of, you know, more purely military line of thinking about Taiwan. But that point, you know, speaks to the military logic of, in value of the Philippines campaign. I guess there's also the question of, you know, If you skip that whole area of the Pacific, let's assume success then on Formosa. You're leaving a lot of unresolved issues to your south and southwest. And I suppose that's discussed. How much do Nimitz and the fans of the Taiwan strategy rate the risk there? Yeah, I mean, they concede that there is perhaps an open flank.

They really do. And there are concerns about that. But they also think that just getting to Formosa, controlling it is going to sever that Japanese line of communication. Because what the Japanese need, they never really wanted the Philippines. What they wanted was today's Indonesia, what was the Dutch East Indies in that era, because there's so many resources. That's what the Imperial Japanese Navy and the larger Japanese high command wants. But, of course, in order to get those resources in Japan, you've got to sail by the Philippines and that line of communication.

And the Philippines, if they remained American controlled, would have always been a kind of bone in the throat. And the Japanese never really controlled the archipelago. By 1944, they're dealing with gorillas and Americans who are working with guerrillas. It's just this mess among the very, you know, 17,000 islands, you know, so no one could control it. And that's the problem for the Americans, too, once they come back, is how do you really, you know, liberate and control this place? So the naval advocates are saying almost like as a magical thing, yeah, there'll be an exposed flank there. But once we have Taiwan, once we're moving on to, say, Okinawa, perhaps Iwo Jima, it won't matter because it'll be right on Japan's doorstep. And I think that perhaps that's a little breezy on their part.

But I also think that MacArthur's vision for coming back to the Philippines is bound to be really costly and really time intensive too. But he would argue it matters more in the larger scheme of things because of this idea of liberation and what that's going to mean, not just the Filipinos, but for many other people throughout the Pacific and Asia who are looking to America's credibility. There comes that word into our conversation that remains through the Cold War, too. And it's rooted in his family story, right? I mean, his dad is a significant figure in Filipino history. He's huge because, yeah, I mean, Arthur MacArthur had been the American, the American. military commander there during the initial American presence, what we often call, I think, incorrectly the Philippine insurrection, which is actually, should be called, in my opinion,

the Philippine-American War because it's basically an American imperial occupation, and Filipino nationalists are against that. You can understand why. And so we end up with this war, mainly a guerrilla war that rages on for years and years. But as this is going on, interestingly enough, you're seeing the beginning of some strong ties of kinship. And the McCarthy, family is sort of the microcosm of that. Arthur MacArthur loved the Philippines and Douglas, who had served there many times, including his first posting as a young officer in 1903, grew to love the archipelago and its people. So the MacArthur family were a very powerful symbol to Filipinos of the 1940s, and I think remain as such today. And of course, someone as sort

of egocentric as MacArthur was going to appreciate that, I think, better than anybody on Earth. So I think he felt a kind of a personal sense of mission and his personal sense of honor that this simply had to be done. He had to lead forces to go back to eliminate the Japanese presence of the Philippines. And on a humanitarian level, he felt that what would happen if we bypass the Philippines was that the Japanese was simply starve off the population. And you would lose, untold hundreds of thousands of people and that this would be blood on America's fingertips. And, you know, you can kind of understand that, too. So I think the Philippines is like a lot of things in war. There's no really good solution.

If you go there, you're going to have real problems. If you bypass it, you're going to have real problems, too. So I'm very sympathetic to both arguments, and I don't know that there was a 100% fail-save choice. So we've been talking here for a little bit more than 30 minutes, and we've mentioned his name, but we've yet to really address Stillwell in China. Tell us a little bit about Stillwell and how he ends up there and the challenges that he faces. Yeah, I mean, Stillwell, in a way, would envy MacArthur and Nimitz in that they spend most of their time on operational matters commanding American or, you know, closely associated to allied forces like Australian of like-minded people in kinetic operations. Stillwell's command is not really oriented that way.

He's there as an advisor to Shankai Shack. And, of course, Shanker Shek and the Nationalists are nominally in control. the Chinese government, but obviously they have a major challenge from the Chinese communists in the north, Miles Sadong and his people. There's also, I think we tend to forget this, a kind of accommodationist Chinese government that exists in Japanese-controlled territory. So you have just this political morass going on in this incredibly important country. Stillwell had a bond and a love for the Chinese people, maybe not quite as akin to MacArthur in the Philippines, but not too far away from that.

Still will have spent a lot of time in China. He understood the language, spoke it to some extent, could read it some, and not many American officers could claim that. So on the face of it, when he's sent to China in 1942, he's the perfect guy for this job because he cares deeply about China. He knows about it, and he has clear ideas about what he wants China to be, but he's also the worst guy for the job because he is. so preternaturally honest that he cannot,

cannot tolerate anything less than that in the folks around him. And Shankaj Shek and his retinue in Stillwell's view are corrupt and Byzantine and selfish and, you know, and just not the kind of people he wants to support. So this simmering hatred grows in him and he's a very peppery guy. his is obviously his nickname is Binarder Joe because he you know he often tells you what he thinks for well or ill and so he doesn't hold back and it's pretty clear that he has this tension with Shankashak and his government and this has been going on on and off for two years by 1944 they had thought about the Chinese wanted him out by 1943 by the fall but the the folks in Washington aren't ready to do that and enough people in China aren't ready to do that so he stays on and they're supposed to make nice. And so still was preoccupation by the spring of 44 is in opening up a land supply route into China through Burma primarily. And they've been struggling to do this for the better part of the year, year and a half.

And that is mainly an engineering problem of building a road through this wilderness jungle, some of the world's worst places, and doing it with some level of Japanese resistance. But you're battling nature. And about two-thirds on the American side, about two-thirds of the engineers who are working on that road are African-Americans in segregated units. And I think we tend to overlook that, too, what this meant for them, living out in these kind of conditions, building a road out of jungle wilderness. And then eventually, once the road's built, driving trucks along this difficult route. Because previously, they're trying to supply China by air, and that's just kind of a hand-to-mouth operation. And strategically, China is a backwater compared to the European theater and the resource of pouring in elsewhere in the Pacific. And Shankashek resents that.

So the version in this part of the war of interservice rivalry is a sort of Army Air Corps. I don't know if that's interservice technically. But that's the debate. It's between the sort of ground thinking and the air thinking in this part as opposed to Army versus Navy. Yeah. So Stillwell's enemies within the military. structure and politically will later paint him as this sort of anti-deluvian knuckle dragger who doesn't understand much about air matters and all this.

And I tend to think that that's really unfair. Still all understood full well the importance of air power in theater, the advantages of supply by air. And so his critics will say, well, he focuses too much on building that road and it was wasteful. And by the time it's ready in 1945, the purpose of it is less. you know, less relevant to the war. And that's all true, but still well is ordered by the Joint Chiefs in Washington to do this. So he's carrying out orders that he's getting from Washington that he agrees with.

You know, so he is going to use aerial resources reasonably well, but never to the to the satisfaction of Claire Channalt, who is the American, the most dynamic American air commander in theater, really an amazing airman, who nonetheless, like a lot of air power advocates, of the era is going to oversell a good product. You know, air power is incredible and important. But to say it can win the war all on its own, and this is what Chenal tries to tell the Roosevelt administration, hey, give me 200 bombers, I'll win the war on your own.

You won't even have to fight in the Pacific and all this sort of fantasy. And so, you know, resources get poured down that rabbit hole. And so you end up, I mean, when you look at like this China, Burma, India Theater, you will never find a bigger squirrel cage, you know, in America military history of just this constant like agendas and later, latter year backbiting and Byzantine political stuff and all these implications. And of course, part of this is because of what eventually happens in China, of China becoming communist and everything that meant for the Cold War.

So the point I try to make, and this is sort of eye-opening for me, is someone who had tended to cover the European theater more than the Pacific Theater, is that, you know, when we choose the Germany and Europe first policy, and I'm not necessarily saying voicing opposition to it, but I am saying it has a consequence. And the consequence, ultimately, is that China is de-emphasized. And when China is de-emphasized, we then have less influence to shape the kind of China we want. And I think we could argue that what eventually happens in China as a kind of antecedent to that and consequence of it is, of course, the most important event in modern history, the advent of the People's Republic of China in 1949. everything that meant for the Cold War, including two shooting American wars in Korea and Vietnam,

and of course, the legacy we live with today, that I think we'd all dare say is pretty relevant. You write vividly and movingly about the life of POWs during these years. A lot of Americans in particular in 1942 are taking prisoner by the Japanese, and they spend the war if they survive it in this sort of Pacific version of the Gulag Archipelago. What's life like for a POW? Life for an American POW under the Japanese is almost uniformly a nightmare. And you see that, of course, from the beginning with the famous Baton death march, which I covered in the previous volume Fire and Fortitude.

And for the survivors of the Batian Death March, they have in front of them what's called Camp O'Donnell, which is just a complete hellhole, which the Americans lose a lot of people. 1,547 Americans die at Camp O'Donnell and probably almost 20 times as many Filipinos. So the Japanese had a viewpoint that the POWs were not really men. They were not soldiers.

They did not necessarily deserve any kind of treatment. Japan was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention of Treatment of Prisoners in 1929. And of course, Japan was thinking in terms of conserving its resources. So they're using the POWs as slave labor. They're not feeding them much. 37% of American POWs of the Japanese did not survive. that's a huge number. I'm amazed that the number wasn't higher, though.

And so what I do through the whole trilogy, starting with fire and fortitude, continuing on island infernos, is I kind of tell you the POW experience through the eyes of four individuals who I think are reflective and also, I think, quite fascinating. General Jonathan Wainwright,

who obviously is the ranking POW, you know, so you're seeing the kind of senior level and the idea of responsibility that he's gotten, how difficult it is for him, you know, on that level. And then Lieutenant Colonel Harold K. Johnson, who is a, you know, a field grade at that point and had fought the Philippines and survived the Patan death march, Camp O'Donnell. His experiences take him all over eventually back to Japan as a slave labor. And it brings that to life for you.

And he, of course, I think as you may know, later becomes Army Chief of Staff. He's a remarkable figure. And then two lower-ranking soldiers, Private Lester Tenney, who was a tanker, tough kid from Chicago, very glib, and you kind of see his odyssey and how he helps survive in part because of his congeniality and his really good reading of people. He later becomes a professor, you know, in his post-war life. And another guy named Private Michael Campbell, who's an infantryman and has had a very tough upbringing in Michigan. And you also kind of see, you know, through his eyes what that means for the private soldier and how you can possibly survive. And I think it's incredibly moving. Just to kind of bring us, bring us to a conclusion here. You mentioned a few minutes ago how the legacy of the war, you know, in particular, the creation of the PRC is still with us today. We have Chairman Xi threatening Taiwan. We have, you know, ever-present tensions over the South China Sea. the Sea of Japan, there are any number of flashpoints which could start or be the source of a

major war. What strategic lessons do you think apply from the 1940s, the experience of the Army and the Navy, for that matter, in the Pacific to today? Or is it just that things have changed? So there's not much we could really draw from the experience of World War II. How would you approach that. You know, I would say, it was a uniform sense, culture matters, the culture of military operations, and how they fight and how they get along with one another, but also understanding more about local cultures. I think as much as still well understood about Chinese culture as he saw it, in the end, he wasn't effective. Why wasn't he effective? Because he could not really accept the milieu in which he was operating. And when that happened, then it diminishes

US influence, it diminishes Shang's long-term viability. It has consequences. And I think that when you look at that, you can begin to see the beginning of a real debacle in China whose reverberations are with us today. And then, of course, culture elsewhere, I think the allies are more effective, more effective than Japanese. The interesting, you know, I go into the Japanese point of view quite a bit in these books, especially the average Japanese soldier and their diaries. And they think they're fighting a war of freedom to get rid of colonial white imperialists. And you can understand that. But the Japanese are much the same thing, only worse.

And so there's their influence with, whether we're talking about the Philippines or in Burma or in the South Pacific, wherever we're talking about, their military power is diminished by their lack of cultural influence and vice versa for the Americans, the Australian. and not as much the British, but, you know, nonetheless, the knowledge are a little more effective at it. And so I think that's one of the kind of overweening lessons of the whole thing. The other thing, strategic priorities. There's no way you're going to have all right or wrong choices. The strategic thinkers in World War II have to prioritize a global war, an existential war. And as you said, there's two alligators at the door. And so you're going to have tough choices.

They choose in favor of Europe, which in essence means casting your lot with Joe Stalin and the Soviet Union. I highly recommend, by the way, Sean McMeekin's book, Everybody, Stalin's War. You may not agree with everything in there, but it need to be said. It's provocative stuff to help you look at the war differently and to see the consequences. And I try to do a little bit of that in relation to China to say, well, there could have been a different way where you're prioritizing China and thus having perhaps more influence, perhaps a different outcome. Who knows? But this Europe first had consequences. It doesn't mean it was wrong. It does mean that strategic thinkers are always going to have to make really tough choices. And even if you're right in one vein, you may be really terribly wrong in another.

And then that has consequences down the line. And I think the Pacific Asia War really shows you that as much as anything. John McManus, author of Island Infernos. Thanks so much for joining. Thanks for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.