Why Did FDR Fail to Relieve MacArthur and 151,000 Troops Fighting the Japanese in the Philippines?

Breitbart ^ | 4 Aug 2013 | Diana West

[cutty]

According to Soviet intelligence reports, we now know that one of FDR’s top officials, the Treasury Department’s Harry Dexter White, was a Soviet agent, who, among many other deceptions, subverted relations between the US and Japan by inserting “ultimatum” language into the cable flow that actually spurred the Japanese attack. This was language written in Moscow, passed to White by a Soviet handler in Washington, D.C., and dropped into a State Department communiqué sent to Japan.

This brilliantly executed influence operation doesn’t live in infamy – at least not yet.

...

“A continuous stream of fighter and pursuit planes is traversing the Pacific,” FDR cabled MacArthur is early 1942, one of the extravagant lies FDR told to the people and forces under Japanese siege. No planes were on their way. Nothing was coming. .. Truth, John Hersey later wrote, would come “in mean little doses.”

...

the US continued to sustain catastrophic losses while shipping Lend Lease supplies to Stalin through the Nazi U-boat-infested North Atlantic.

Could the decision to abandon US forces to death or the horrors of Japanese POW camps by giving uninterrupted priority to the Red Army have had anything to do with the influence of the scores of Soviet agents and assets within reach of the levers of power inside the US government? How about the man driving military supply policy, the man behind Lend Lease?

That man was Harry Hopkins and he was without question FDR’s top wartime advisor. As George Marshall would state in 1957 to his official biographer Forrest Pogue: “Hopkins’s job with the president was to represent the Russian interests. My job was to represent the American interests.”

Was Hopkins representing Russian interests at a time of American need?

Who was Harry Hopkins?

[buwaya]

Better tactics with P40s could give a better exchange ratio than even. The AVG and even the USAAF showed that, later.
And most Japanese fighters in the Philippines weren’t zeros.

[ANGGAPO]

The Navy cleaned up a lot of them and the AAF with the P-38 got the remainder.

[GeronL]

If China were smart they have a great trading partner in Taiwan and in South Korea. If they let NK collapse, a united Korea would not have any foreign forces (except maybe a US naval base for old times sake) and they would gain a pretty peaceful neighbor. As a matter of fact I think Korea would agree in a heartbeat to put no military forces north of the 38 once united.

[ANGGAPO]

The only Jap airplanes that I saw were JN Zeros and a few Bettys. I think that our big advantage was that none of them had self-sealing fuel tanks. But someplace I did see Japanese airplanes with raw rubber sheets strapped on the wings over the tanks. I doubt if that worked though.

[buwaya]

You saw Jap planes ? Were you out there in WWII ?

FWIW, the Japanese Naval airforce (Tainan wing and others) was active over the Philippines only up to the end of Dec 1941, after the Japanese landings it was almost all Japanese army units, which in the Philippines mainly used Nakajima Ki-27 “Nate”.

[jmacusa]

We were supplying weapons to Britain prior to our entry into the war. There were also Americans flying P-40’s for The Nationalist Chinese. “The Flying Tigers’’. Hitlers persecution of the Jews guaranteed that the ‘’brain drain'' needed to make a bomb would have seriously impacted Germanys ability to produce a bomb and of course Hitlers turning on his former Soviet ally insured an inevitable defeat. read a little more WW2 history and you'll see what an idiot Hitler really was.

[montanajoe]

We killed plenty..have you been to the cemetery near Las Paz there are at least 50K killed there we lost about 14k...

The point I'm making is that it was no cakewalk in the Philippines as Mac Arthur thought it would be, we had to take more than 50 islands between the invasion in October 1944 and the end of the war..not to mention the destruction of Manila.

Much of this in my view was due to Mac Arthur's arrogance..

[SunkenCiv]

This is garbage. US armed forces were small, a chunk of the rather small US Pacific fleet was wrecked or sunk in Pearl Harbor (most of them were quickly fixed, and were rushed into naval action in the Far East), and the Japanese had naval supremacy until their disaster at Midway.

[SunkenCiv]

Exactly!

It took years to fully mobilize, and Marshall wanted a cross-channel invasion back into France in 1942, but the Higgins boats that made that possible weren’t available in sufficient quantity until literally just before — the Higgins boats were being painted as they were rolling on the railways to be shipped to Britain.

I’m perfectly able to accept that there were traitors in the US and UK — there were three, four, maybe five in the Manhattan Project, and four inside the MI6, even Ultra was known about by Stalin — but it has nothing to do with this.

I don’t like FDR, and it’s clear that he had the carriers steam south from Pearl to get them out of the way during the Dec 7 attack he’d been made aware of, but this piece looks like bashing.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

The Japanese had had their asses handed to them by the Soviets (led by Zhukov) at Khalkhin Gol in 1939 and had just signed a peace treaty just two months before the Germans invaded the USSR. Plus they needed their resources for their drive into Southeast Asia, which had strategic benefits far beyond what invaded eastern Siberia would yield.

[SunkenCiv]

...the US continued to sustain catastrophic losses while shipping Lend Lease supplies to Stalin through the Nazi U-boat-infested North Atlantic.

Wow, that is dumb. 80% of German troops losses in WWII were on the Russian Front. For years until the German 6th A surrendered at Stalingrad (and even a little beyond, until Kursk, because the German counters after Stalingrad shattered the offensive capability of the Red Army in the south), the fear was Soviet collapse and a multi-prong Axis takeover of the Middle East.

Stalin was livid that there wasn't a second front, and it didn't improve after he was promised that there would be.

When he was told about the planned North Africa amphibious assaults and destruction of the Afrika Korps, followed by invasions of Italy, and that the Lend-Lease shipments would have to stop in order to supply these offensives, he reacted positively, surprising everyone.

Those Mediterranean sideshows (the fight up the Italian peninsula was one of the most toughest of the war, if not the toughest) were all about postwar positioning of the British Empire on the one hand, and about delaying the cross-channel invasion of France on the other. YOU need to build more amphibious landing capability, but first, lets shift what you already have to the "soft underbelly".

Lend-Lease to Britain was large, but most of the convoy traffic was done in order to keep the British public from freezing and starving and of course from turning on their gov't and giving up.

[rmlew]

It wasn’t his fault that the aArmy Air Corp had one air patrol and isntead of haveing a combat air patrol decided to bomb Formosa. The 5th Interceptor Command and 24th Pursuit Group were were beyond incompetent. Any high ranking officers who survived the camps should have been shot for dereliction of duty.

[Gandalf_The_Gray]

If China were smart they have a great trading partner in Taiwan and in South Korea. If they let NK collapse, a united Korea would not have any foreign forces (except maybe a US naval base for old times sake) and they would gain a pretty peaceful neighbor. As a matter of fact I think Korea would agree in a heartbeat to put no military forces north of the 38 once united.

Agree on Korea, they are like the divided Germany. They would agree in a heartbeat and have actively pushed for reunification. The only block to that has been the north's rigid Stalinist dictatorship witch won't cooperate with the south. I suspect that the north's military government is wary of letting their population (serfs/slaves) see the south's booming economy.

Like the reunification of Germany, South Korea doesn't see the problems of absorbing their northern neighbor with no assets to speak off except a lot of obsolete artillery and a starving population. The North's infrastructure is largely rusting scrap metal. I doubt the south has any desire to become a nuclear power and would probably ask the Chinese for help in decommissioning the weapons program. They might move toward pressurized light water reactors to beef up their electrical grid.

As for Taiwan they also have a "power house" economy and would be happy to trade with most anyone. However, they are wary of the mainland Chinese as they have in the past used Taiwanese real estate for target practice. The mainland Chinese also are rigid in their demands that the "rebellious province" forswear their sovereignty and reunite with mainland China. That point is the deal breaker and I don't see any possible compromise on either side (think Palestine vs Israel). If the communists were to relax their demand for reunification, everyone would breath easier and trade (spice?) would flow.

Regards,
GtG

PS If China were to relax it's demands for the return of Taiwan there is the possibility that trade between the two might increase to the point that de facto reunification happens. They already share a common language and 6000 years of history. In politics never say "Never".

G

[JerseyanExile]

This is an extremely inaccurate article. The Philippines had been deemed indefensible for decades. War Plan Orange, the American guide for war in the Pacific against Japan, dictated that the Philippines were to be abandoned - they were too exposed, too close to major Japanese bases in Formosa, and the supply lines across the Pacific too great. Instead, the plan called for a withdrawal to the eastern Pacific, while superior American industry built up an overwhelming naval force. Then, in two to three years, America would go on the offensive, taking strategic islands as bases and retaking the Philippines. US strategy in the Pacific was basically a variant of the pre-war Plan Orange.

It was the Army, lobbied by MacArthur, that ignored the Navy’s plan, and started building up forces in the Philippines, despite the fact that the Navy had no plans or capability to support and resupply them. War Plan Orange, by Edward Miller, is a great book about this, really goes in depth about the topic. I highly suggest it.

[JerseyanExile]

Actually, far from getting gutted, American military spending significantly increased during the 1930s under FDR, even in his first term. It almost doubled as a percentage of GDP, and also increased in absolute terms, though not by as much.

[jmacusa]

FDR should have been impeached for allowing the military to fall into such a degraded condition.

[jmacusa]

And that’s why we had obsolete dive bombers and fighter planes and no real heavy tanks. Where did you get this info?

[JerseyanExile]

Alright. First off, let's set some ground rules - I'm not going to say that the 1930s military buildup was, in hindsight, perfect. But only that it was good considering American attitudes towards a peacetime military at the time, and when compared to FDR's predecessors. So, that means comparing the 1930s to the 1920s.

Jonah Goldburg mentions the FDR military buildup of the early and mid 1930s in Liberal Facism. Breakdowns of military expenditures show that military expenditures between 1933 and the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 were higher than comparable periods of time in the 1920s. The number of military personnel also increased. Military spending between 1933 and the summer of 1939 averaged 1.049 billion dollars per year. A comparable period of the latter half of the 1920s averaged 745 million dollars per year.

The primary beneficiary of these funds was the navy, a choice that seems vindicated by the course of the war that was too come. More than 130 warships were laid down between 1933-39. In 1932, the navy had 132 warships in service - in 1939, 178, a much larger proportion of which were modern. This was also a period when the US was bound by treaty restrictions on naval construction, some of which had been signed in the 1920s.

Now, the Army did languish in this period, but that was pretty much par for the course at the time period. The US didn't really keep a large or modern army around in peacetime, and the US had always entered wars having to build up a new army from scratch, using the small peacetime force as a central corps around which to build the newly mobilized force. Considering that, the army actually did quite well when compared to the 1920s. Total forces were increased, and the reserves were drastically increased in size (243,971 in 1933 vs 334,473 in June of 1939). The Westervelt Board's recommendations on the design of new artillery and AA pieces to be employed in a future war were followed, and an entire family of new arms were trialed and entered production in the 1930s. Congress had killed the early Tank Corps in 1920, crippling the development of armor in America, but even so, trial mechanized fores were formed in the 1930s, and large numbers of prototypes were constructed and experimented with. Although only two tank models, the M1 and M2 Light, actually saw mass production, overall, the US managed to maintain the capability to design modern combat vehicles, and when the spigots were unleashed in late 1939, they were able to come up with some excellent vehicles. Small arms and equipment were also modernized, and most Army units transitioned to motorized formations. The Air Corps also experimented with many types of aircraft, and saw hundreds of modern, metal monoplane bombers, fighters, and patrol aircraft enter service, building the foundation for the solid designs of WW2. As to your specific points - the US Army, serving as an expeditionary force on the attack across vast oceans, had no need for heavy tanks, and quite properly chose not to to adopt any. The newest American fighters and bombers in service in 1941 were comparable to their counterparts fielded by other great powers.

[jmacusa]

And in this supposed military build up in the midst of the worst economy in history, how did FDR fund "The New Deal''? The M2 light tank(the Stuart'') fared poorly in combat, at least when it went up against the superior armor of the Germans. The M3 was not a very good tank because of it's high silhouette and because it's main heavy gun, the 75mm, was side mounted with a limited arc of fire. It was later regulated to the Pacific and used strictly for infantry support. It's replacement, the M4 Sherman fared little better. Read the book ''Deathtraps'' by Captain Belton Cooper.He served with the 3rd Armored Division in WW2. The Sherman's only saving grace was that it could be massed produced. The Germans called it ''The Ronson Tank'' after the famous cigarette lighter of the day who's slogan was ''Lights on the first strike''. The Sherman ''brewed up''(caught fire) when ever hit by a German 75 or 88 mm gun. It was a damn shame the worlds premiere automaker, America, and the Sherman was the best it could come up with. In going up against the far superior Panther MkV the ratio needed to knock one out was five Shermans to one Panther. For the Tiger Mark 6 the ratio doubled although when that thing appeared in any armored fight it was either get in close under the range of it's superior 88mm main gun , hide or let the artillery knock it out.The Brewster Buffalo fighter plane , the P-40 Tomahawk, The Douglas ''Devastator'' torpedo plane and the Grumman F 4 ''Wildcat'' were far out classed by the ME. 109 and the Japanese '';Zero'' respectively. Claire Chenualt's Flying Tigers'' found out never to get into a turning fight with a Jap Zero. The best they could do was to get up above it by some several thousand feet, dive, open fire and then high tail out of there. It wasn't until the Grumman F 6 ''Hellcat'' fighter came into service in 1943 did the Navy and Marine pilots have a fighter that could best the Zero.The Douglas Devastator was replaced by the Grumman “Avenger’’, the P-40 would later be replaced by the P-38 “Lightning’’ , The P-47 Thunderbolt fighter/bomber and by perhaps the best piston engine fighter ever built, the P-51 Mustang. The record is clear. When America first entered WW2 it was not equipped with many first rate weapons systems.

[fso301]

They also lacked air units appropriate for naval interdiction. The three squadrons of A-24 divebombers that were on the way (the light bomber group ground crew was in the Philippines, but without planes; they were all captured) would have been ideal, but they would also have required time to train, and they would require replacements to stay in the fight. Attrition would quickly exterminate any fixed body of combat planes.

The A-24's would have been helpful but like most everything else, MacArthur wasn't expecting to have Luzon near target strength until circa 3/42.

A significant force that was available on 12/8/41 and might have profoundly impacted the course of events had it been employed were submarines. Something like 30 subs were based in Manila but the navy in it's infinite wisdom responded to repeated war alerts by re-checking mooring and anchor lines.