Hall, Charles Phillip (1886-1953)

U.S. Army. Via Wikimedia Commons

Charles Hall was born in Mississippi and attended the University of Mississippi for two years before transferring to West Point. He graduated in 1911 with a higher class standing than any other American combat corps commander of the war.. He fought with 2 Division in the First World War, participated in the battle of Belleau Wood, and the Aisne-Marne and Saint-Mihiel offensives. He graduated from the Command and General Staff School in 1926 and the Army War College in 1930.

Hall had just been promoted to brigadier general when war broke out. He was subsequently promoted to major general and assigned to command XI Corps in the southwest Pacific, directing its operations in New Guinea and Morotai. He took command of the American forces at the Battle of the Driniumor River in July 1944, abandoning Gill's defensive strategy and beating off a desperate attack by Adachi's 18 Army on Aitape.  Hall later conducted the nearly flawless Morotai operation. His corps landed near Subic Bay in Luzon in late January 1945, cutting off the Bataan Peninsula to prevent the Japanese from retreating there for a final defense as the Americans had done in 1941. He was promoted to lieutenant general just as the war ended, and was acting commander of 8 Army in the initial stages of the occupation and was involved in preparations for the Tokyo war crimes trials.

Hall was "small, taciturn and somewhat remote" and was occasionally creative in his interpretation of orders (Taaffe 2011). The latter trait served him well at Aitape, where he sensed he would need his entire corps staff and brought them in contrary to instructions from Krueger. MacArthur considered replacing Krueger with Hall after the Luzon campaign bogged down, but Hall's conduct of the Bataan campaign was judged lackluster by Taaffe (2011).

Service record

References

Dupuy et.al. (1992)

Generals.dk (accessed 2008-3-7)

Pettibone (2006)

Taaffe (2011)

The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia © 2007-2008, 2012, 2016 by Kent G. Budge. Index

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