MacArthur and Willoughby: Two "Bataan Boys" and a Case Study of Intelligence Operations in Asia from 1941-1951

Abstract

Like all historical figures and events, the coverage and opinions surrounding General Douglas MacArthur and his staff during the period spanning World War II and the occupation of Japan are varied and sometimes controversial. While General MacArthur is known in popular history and among much of the American public as a decorated and famous war hero who bravely and selflessly commanded U.S. Army forces in the Pacific to victory against Japan, various long-form historical accounts from academic historians touch on the fact that much of this positive view was in a sense engineered by MacArthur's staff and public relations team. Not only, historians show, did MacArthur have a bad relationship with most of Washington's political and military leaders during and after the war, he insisted on always being the star of the show and would not allow anyone else to stand in the limelight. Several aspects which enrich and deepen the study of this period have only more recently been explored, such as a more detailed and objective look about the dynamics of MacArthur's team, referred to often as the Bataan Boys. One relationship that seems to be of particular importance is that of MacArthur and members of his intelligence staff, primarily his G-2 (intelligence) chief Major General Charles A. Willoughby, as well as Major General Spencer B. Akin, head of the Signal Corps and (only discovered after the declassification of documents more recently) a key player in Central Bureau, the secret Allied encryption unit that broke Japanese military communications codes. Studies on this unit have shown that MacArthur's usage of this intelligence gathered from Japanese military communications was selective; when he saw intelligence that lined up with his personal goals for the war, he unquestioningly used it as justification for his operations, but when encountering intelligence that went against these goals, he would ignore it or even downplay the importance of the intelligence before reporting it to superiors and field commanders. This pattern of selective use of intelligence due to narcissistic reasons and for the achievement of personal goals is echoed in studies of MacArthur's contribution to the breakdown of U.S. intelligence estimates leading up to the Chinese military campaigns during the Korean War. Willoughby, for his part, is no better, and has his own murky history, which is far less documented. Willoughby's German heritage and strong right-wing anti-communist views accompany a fascination with fascism, and these values lead him to also act in ways sometimes contrary to the goals of the overall Japanese occupation. While working officially as the historian to write MacArthur's official command history for the war and occupation, Willoughby allegedly worked to pull MacArthur's interest away from the interests of more pro-democratic actors in the Tokyo General Headquarters (GHQ), going as far as spying on his adversaries within headquarters, and aligning with high-ranking former leaders of Japanese military intelligence (who ultimately had their own dangerous goals for rearming Japan) to form a new postwar Japanese intelligence operation which would be tasked with rooting out communist and left-wing movements within the country.