Who was the supreme commander and chief of combined staff in the pacific theatre (WW2)?

Question

I know their counterparts for European theatre is Eisenhower and George C Marshall respectively.

Answer 1

Chief of Staff is an American rank.it is the highest ranking office in the US Army...(Doug MacArthur held the job in the 30's before retiring and moving to the Philippines; FDR and WW2 brought him back to service)

George Marshall was Chief of Staff in WW2 and thus outranked MacArthur and Eisenhower. His Navy counterpart was Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations and both worked out of Washington

Ike was Supreme Allied Commander Europe and in charge of EVERYONE.....Army Navy Air Force, British Canadian American.....east of Iceland. His naval commander ((CINCLANT) was an American, his Air Force Chief a Brit, his two Army commanders were Bradley USA and Montgomery (Brit) His was a theater command and an actual fighting command.

The Pacific was less clear. You couldn't do anything other than recognize MacArthur's genius...as well as ego.....after he escaped the Philippines in a PT boat one step ahead of the Japs. As was said, Mac was made Supreme Allied Commander, Southwest Pacific and ran the US Army, Australian Army and Navy and a detached part of the US Pacific fleet in his campaign to defend Australia, take back New Guinea, then island hop up and liberate the Philippines. Had it come to it, he would have commanded the invasion of Japan. He was nominally subordinate to Marshall and equal in rank to Ike, both of whom had worked for him at one point in the 20's.

Everything else in the Pacific........and there was A LOT of everything else...was Adm. Chester Nimitz. He commanded from Alaska to California to Panama to Samoa and Hawaii and eventually the shores of Japan; working for him were Halsey, Sprunace, Mitschner, Vandergrift and Howlin Mad Smith.......to say there weren't any land battles in this area is incorrect. The US Navy and the United States Marines, under Nimitz, won such places as Guadalcanal and Midway; liberated Guam and Saipan; and took two islands known as Okinawa and Iwo Jima.

This divided command violated every rule of war, logic and common sense, and almost came to grief at the invasion of the Philippines ( Mac lead the actual invasion force; Halsey the distant covering force and the Japs almost slipped in between the two) ;
yet this division of command and labor and ego worked damn well for 4 years, keeping the Japs off balance and never knowing who was going to show where and when and shortened the war by a good 2 years

Answer 2

Douglas MacArthur was the supreme commander for the Allied land forces. Chester Nimitz was the commander of the US Navy in the Pacific Theatre.

Answer 3

Nimitz was the Pacific version of Marshall. His technical title was CINCPAC (Command in Chief...Pacific)
McArthur was the Pacific version of Ike. His technical title was CSWPOA (Commander Southwest Pacific Ocean Areas).
Since all the land-based fighting was in the Southwest Pacific, it worked out that McArthur was in charge of all land battles.

Answer 4

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