What he said. The Pacific campaign was not purely a military affair. Even without Mac, the U.S. public would be vocally demanding that the defeats of 1941-42 be avenged, something that FDR would be very conscious about. Also, the U.S. campaign in the Philippines did serve to end the Japanese occupation sooner, and no one deserved to live a moment longer in those conditions than necessary.(1)
1) Not to mention providing large air bases to interdict shipping traffic between Japan and their possessions in the DEI, Malaya, and French Indo-China.
MacArthur didn't speak for the U.S. government, so bad faith is of no moment. (2) (Nor is is exactly remarkable a government changes its mind, as witness promises by one U.S. administration to South Vietnam, reneged on by another...) (3)
The political fallout IMO is overblown; it's 1944, not 1994. Congress, & the public, didn't have the influence on decisions we take for granted. (4)
Furthermore, if P.I. were bypassed, the battles of Iwo Jima & Okinawa would be over before the elections...& we'd be talking about the prospect of Japan's surrender by Christmas. (5) Tell me
that wouldn't be politcally popular.
2) His promise was taken as a matter of policy by the public. It was never disavowed by FDR. He would have lost control of the US House of Representatives in 1942 had he done so.
3) Promises made to a corrupt venal independent government (South Vietnam) in a war lasting 15 years involving American troops taking 56,000 American lives and twenty times as many Asians. Saigon had its chance to clean up its act, but its leaders were too busy collecting bullion. Contrast that to promises made to an American territorial government and their people. The people of that land who were suffering under Japanese occupation and despite that maintaining a strong guerilla resistance under the expectation of an eventual American liberating fleet and army.
4) The Congress and the public had a lot more influence over decisions back then. The lobbyists hadn't taken over yet. Gerrymandering was mostly a Southern symptom in those days. And 1944 was an election year. FDR may have been a lock, but those House and Senate seats were not. If Roosevelt wanted his spending programs passed he needed the support of a Democratic Congress facing two elections in WWII.
5) Japan's surrender by Christmas 1944!? Wow. I've been served up some fat pitches before, but...

I think I'll let other others take that one. I don't want to be greedy.
Go for Mindanao first in order to have airfields with which to pound the refineries and oil wells on Borneo instead of having to mount extreme-range raids from New Guinea. This also gives you air coverage over the rest of the Philippines, and there's some actual infrastructure available on Mindanao to support troops and planes.
Good arguments all. But they are predicated on a military POV
only. Liberating the Philippines was as equally a political action. Landing at Leyte, while not as sound logistically or operationally as Mindanao, allowed for a more rapid series of landings in the more population rich island of Luzon. Meaning an earlier liberation of more Filippinos (like in Manila

) and the PoW camps in the interior.
Also, the idea was to break land based Japanese airpower in the Philippines before the IJN could interfere (done, mostly) and then crush the IJN fleets when they arrived (done, mostly). The occupation of the Philippines wasn't about getting strategic bombers bases to hit anything in the DEI. The Allied B-24s in Australia and New Guinea were already doing a good enough job of that. Between the sabotage done by the Dutch oil crews before the oilfields were taken by the Japanese, the piss-poor job the Japanese did of repairing the wells, and what the Allied B-24s in Australia and New Guinea did to those fields in turn, by the time the Australian Army invaded the DEI in early to mid-1945 there wasn't anything left of those Dutch oilfields but ruins.
Those American bomber bases (to be) in the Philippines were for...see my response at top to
John Farson
The Sandman said:
Other good targets might have been the Andamans and Timor. Again, the goal is to bring the major ports and oil-related infrastructure of the DEI and Malaya within range of large numbers of Allied aircraft.
The Andamans would have been a good idea, but the Royal Navy was too busy for most of the war. By the time they were finally ready to make the jump (Operation Dracula) the war was over. The distances for the logistics for Timor were just too extreme earlier in the war. And too many narrow restricting island channels for the Allied navies to have proper freedom of movement. Even in the Philippines it was basically all down to the Surigao and San Bernadino Straits. Forcing the USN to operate to the east and the IJN to the west.
The Sandman said:
New Guinea was a waste of resources after the end of the Kokoda Trail campaign, and shouldn't have been done. Use those ships and troops for Timor instead, or just send them entirely out of the theater.
It's not a question of troops, or even ships so much. New Guinea was the only place where land based American air power could be fully brought to bear against the Japanese. And after Kokoda, the US Navy was busy in the Central Pacific. The South West Pacific campaigns in New Guinea allowed for a strategic diversion that the US could afford and the Japanese couldn't. If Timor had been attempted after Kokoda, and the Japanese Navy had chosen (if timed right) to respond in full, MacArthur's little fleet and invasion forces could have faced destruction with most of the US Navy thousands of miles away in the Marshalls.
