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For the complicated deceptive tactics of the coastal campaign he needed more good soldiers than George Kenney and his airmen, and he had them. Most important of all was Dick Sutherland, a lean, bronzed, cool precisionist and a laboratory technician in the science of war. Sutherland knew how to translate MacArthur's sweeping plans into detailed operations schedules. For some of the moves in the campaign they made a six-inch-thick volume. In many an advance they refuted Moltke's dictum that no battle can be fought according to plan after the first few minutes. MacArthur-Sutherland battles were fought by plan for days after the first brush with the enemy.
Man with a Purpose. The coastal campaign began slowly. Fighting at the end of one of the war's longest supply lines, MacArthur was often short of supplies, never (until a few months ago) had all the fighting strength he needed. With the single-minded purpose that meant "the Philippines" to the exclusion of every other war objective, he wheedled and and needled Washington to get what he had to have. Soldiers in other theaters said he had "the worst case of localitis" of any theater commander.
This single-mindedness, until he became a success again, made him enemies. The Navy gave him a U.S. fleet (the Seventh) and the Australian Squadron. Once he spoke unguardedly of ''my Navy" and the proud Navy found it hard to forgive him. There was a time, especially while the MacArthur-for-President boom was being drummed up in the States, when the name of Douglas MacArthur was not always cheered in Navy wardrooms.
But as the tide of war surged back across the Pacific and the Navy's theater overlapped into MacArthur's domain, there came the inevitable discovery: MacArthur and the Navy (as wags liked to put it) were really allies. "Bull" Halsey met MacArthur; they found there was no reason for friction — at least, not any more. Chester Nimitz flew down to New Guinea; he and MacArthur conferred. While the Navy struck across the Pacific, through the Gilberts and Marshalls, past Truk and into the Marianas and western Carolines, MacArthur's men got stout naval support.
He also got heavy increases in his fighting manpower. By the time he was ready to invade the Philippines, he had already written military history: he had saved Australia, recovered New Guinea; his coastal campaign, fought by a series of leapfrog attacks with gathering momentum and a rare economy of men, had become one of the most successful of the TIME, OCTOBER 30, 1944 The Douglas MacArthur who landed at Leyte last week had written an extraordinary chapter n personal experience as well as in public service. Past 60, with a crack record behind him, he had had to prove himself all over again. He had done it.
Now, beyond the retirement age (64), he was still learning his art, still finding new plays for his battle-tried team in which Sutherland and the three Ks (Krueger, Kinkaid and Kenney — see below) functioned as smoothly as the Naval Observatory clock in Washington. It was a winning team, and Douglas MacArthur had made it so.