The Generals

by Winston Groom

  The shocked Russians sent their much larger Baltic Fleet halfway around the world only to fall victim to the worst naval defeat in modern history. Twenty Russian warships, including four new battleships, were surprised and sunk by the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima Strait, and seven other Russian battleships shamefully struck their colors and were captured. Between four thousand and six thousand of the czar’s sailors perished in the action and the world awakened to the fact that Japan was a major international power.

  The Russo-Japanese War also unleashed the first wave of anti-American sentiment in the nationalistic Japanese empire. Since its victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898 the United States had come to acquire vast properties in the far eastern Pacific, including Wake, Guam, and Midway islands, as well as the enormous archipelago of the Philippines. All of these properties lay in what the Japanese regarded as their “sphere of influence,” and American diplomats, including Douglas MacArthur’s father, Arthur MacArthur, were even then privately warning that the emperor’s military was casting a hungry eye upon these remote possessions.

  Theodore Roosevelt, whose slogan was “speak softly and carry a big stick,” decided to roll out the big stick for the Japanese in the form of a “goodwill” cruise by all sixteen battleships of the U.S. Navy, painted white to signify friendship. In fact, it was a supreme example of gunboat diplomacy. On October 18, 1908, this armada arrived in Yokohama, where it was greeted by cheering throngs of Japanese who showered the American sailors with gifts.

  This was in direct contrast to recent charges of anti-Japanese racism in the United States. Japanese had begun immigrating to America—in particular to the West Coast—in large enough numbers to alarm many who termed the flood the “Yellow Peril,” a phrase popularized by newspapers of the period. The San Francisco Board of Education in 1906 had ordered Japanese children to be segregated from the whites, and West Coast workers began rioting and attacking Japanese immigrants who, they claimed, were working for “coolie wages,” thus putting them out of jobs. The California legislature passed a resolution that referred to the immigrants as “immoral, intemperate [and] quarrelsome.”

  All of this created a great stir in the Japanese Diet (parliament), where there was talk of declaring war on the United States, a suggestion echoed by reactionary newspapers in Tokyo. Meanwhile, the Japanese increased their orders of warships from Europe, including dreadnought-class battleships.

  The arrival of the Great White Fleet, as if by magic, seemed to sweep away these animosities, but at least one of the American sailors, a young naval ensign and recent graduate of Annapolis named William F. Halsey, wasn’t buying it. Destined for fame as a U.S. Pacific Fleet commander in World War II, “Bull” Halsey recalled, “I felt that the Japanese meant none of their welcome; that they actually disliked us. Nor was I convinced when they presented us with medals confirming the ‘good will’ between our two governments.”14

  Halsey’s premonitions were sadly borne out as Japanese-American relations slowly soured over the next three decades. Beginning in the 1920s, a rise in murderous militarism swept Japan so that by the 1930s it was said to be ruled under a “government by assassination.” Japan repudiated an international naval armament limitation treaty of 1924 and, in 1931, once again invaded Manchuria, bringing on war with China. There commenced riots and beatings of Caucasians in Japanese cities, often “within sight of the police,” after the U.S. Congress passed an immigrant exclusion act that forbade Chinese as well as Japanese from settling on American soil. In 1932 Japan walked out of the League of Nations.

  The Japanese war with China ground on with nightmare slowness and brutality. In 1937, the Japanese exacted what came to be known as the Rape of Nanking—a bloody six-week orgy of almost unimaginable savagery on the peaceful Chinese metropolis. International newspapers and newsreels recorded the deaths of some 300,000 helpless citizens, most of them women and children, who were murdered in the most unspeakable ways. The city was burned and people were thrown into the flames. They were roasted alive or buried alive in pits. Infants were torn limb from limb. More than 80,000 women and children, ranging from eight to eighty years old, were raped by Japanese soldiers. People were speared on bayonets or thrown headlong into wells. Beheadings were so common that they were held on a contest-level basis to see which Japanese army unit could perform the most.

  This reign of cruelty was so abominable that people still writhe at the telling of it; the world, of course, was shocked and horrified but did nothing. Even as the films, photographs, and news stories came back to the Western world, the Japanese claimed they were exaggerated. Later investigations proved that, if anything, the barbarity was underreported. The Japanese army was then two million strong, about fifteen times larger than the army of the United States. It was apparent that the Japanese intended a conquest of the entire Far East but no one knew when or how it would begin.

  As this ghastly situation unfolded, George C. Marshall was abruptly pitchforked onto the world stage.

  WHILE HIS HOME LIFE WAS TUMULTUOUS, Patton still managed to produce a paper for circulation among key officers that was eerily prescient regarding a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Patton’s suspicions about the Japanese began during his earlier tour in Hawaii and became amplified as the Imperial Japanese Army began to invade and conquer her Asian neighbors and establish hegemony over far-flung Pacific islands upon which they built air and naval bases. Entitled “Surprise,” Patton’s paper theorized that the Japanese, “during a profound period of peace,” would sneak aircraft carriers and an invasion force to within two hundred miles of Oahu and launch aerial attacks on U.S. military installations before landing troops. Japanese submarines, he predicted, would be lurking around the entrance to Pearl Harbor to sink any ship that attempted to escape. Also prescient was Patton’s plan for the incarceration of all Japanese in the Hawaiian Islands—including those who had become American citizens—at the opening of hostilities. Only four and a half years later, President Roosevelt’s controversial executive order relocated millions of Japanese from the West Coast of the United States.15

  While the army seriously considered Patton’s warnings, its present state of affairs did not allow for much reaction, and in June 1937 Patton sailed the Arcturus from Honolulu back to California for reassignment on the board of the Cavalry School at Fort Riley. The crew this time consisted of Beatrice, young George, Francis “Doc” Graves, a cook named Suzuiki, and the Norwegian deckhand, who had originally come with the boat. With light westerly winds they made the voyage in just one day short of a month, nearly twice the time of coming over. Once on shore Patton sold the boat but vowed to get another when he reached the East Coast.

  Before he had that chance, however, Patton was riding with Beatrice on the Myopia Hunt course when he did the thing he had so often warned about in the summer bluebottle fly season. He allowed the head of his horse to come even with the stirrups of Beatrice’s horse, a position that put his leg right behind the other horse. When a horse is fly bitten it will often kick, and Beatrice’s did, causing compound fractures of Patton’s right tibia and fibula, which cracked with the sound of a pistol shot.

  While the injury put him out of business for nearly six months, Patton was promoted to colonel in July of 1938 and sent to Fort Clark near San Antonio to command the Fifth U.S. Cavalry Regiment. He was to take his place in the ongoing war games staged by the Third U.S. Army, which were designed to test concepts of troop mobility. By then Patton had become a full exponent of mechanizing the cavalry—not only armored cars and mechanized machine-gun carriages but tanks as well.

  Fort Clark was in wild country, much the same as when Patton had been on the Mexican border with Pershing against Pancho Villa. It had a great restorative effect on Patton, who not only was back in a combat command position but could hunt and fish and ride wherever he damn well pleased. His letters from this time are full of satisfaction, hope, and praise and he made solid friendships among the high-ranking officers on the po
st.

  After only four months, however, Patton was ordered back to Washington to take command of the Third U.S. Cavalry Regiment at Fort Myer. Waiting for him was all the spit and polish of its ceremonial duties, as well as the “Society Circus,” which had been going strong ever since Patton had organized it many years earlier. The reason for the transfer, according to Patton biographer Martin Blumenson, was that a man of Patton’s wealth and social connections was needed as the present commander of the unit. Brigadier General Jonathan Wainwright had driven himself into debt trying to keep up with the constant social swirl on an army officer’s salary.

  This time, in addition to conducting funerals of prominent people at Arlington, Patton’s command escorted many political dignitaries, including the president of Nicaragua and the king and queen of England, who arrived for a visit to Washington in 1939. In between throwing fashionable parties for Washington’s high and mighty, in June of that year Patton and Beatrice bought an eighty-foot, two-masted schooner, the When and If, which they sailed down from Massachusetts into the Chesapeake Bay and up the Potomac to the Capital Yacht Club in Washington, D.C.

  Of course, the vast majority of enlisted soldiers could not live like that, and by mid-month most had run out of money to spend. Curiously, about that same time, Patton’s dog would “mysteriously disappear at the same time each month,” and he would post a reward notice in the stables offering $2 (about $30 in today’s money) for the return of the dog. Invariably the dog would turn up and some “lucky” trooper would collect his reward.16

  By then, Patton’s friend George Marshall had become the army’s chief of staff and was “batching it” with Patton in Patton’s quarters at Fort Myer. It was a temporary stay while the chief of staff’s sumptuous house was being renovated. Beatrice and the children were in the country at Green Meadows and Katherine Marshall was visiting friends. This gave Patton a chance to curry favor with Marshall for other high-ranking officers not so conveniently located.

  And while he was at it, he did the same for himself; when, for instance, Marshall was made a four-star general as chief of staff, Patton presented him a pair of sterling silver stars (eight stars in all) that he had commissioned from a New York jeweler. The army in those days was small and the scheming for promotion among officers resembled, at times, intrigues from the bewildering days of the Borgias. On July 29, 1939, Patton confided to Beatrice that Marshall “is just like an old shoe. Last night he was dining out and instead of having a chauffeur he drove himself! He is going out in the boat with me today [a Saturday]. He does not seem to have many friends.”17

  ON FEBRUARY 21, 1938, Jean MacArthur presented her husband with a seven pound, eight ounce boy who was christened Arthur MacArthur IV. He was tended to by Jean and a Cantonese nurse named Ah Cheu, and quickly the boy became the light of the general’s life. The baby soon learned to walk, and before long MacArthur had created a morning ritual of martial bearing. When young Arthur would toddle into the couple’s bedroom about 7 a.m., MacArthur would spring out of bed and come to attention. Then they would parade around the bedroom with the field marshal of the Philippines making the sound of drums until he burst into song, usually those from the turn of the twentieth century, which he taught to Arthur IV so the two of them could sing duets.

  The birth of the child had a profound effect on Douglas MacArthur, who was going on sixty but looked and now acted twenty years younger. Practically everyone who knew him commented on this.

  Unfortunately, by then, MacArthur had created a number of powerful enemies in Washington, including the new chief of staff Malin Craig, who resented MacArthur’s prominence in the press and ordered him to return to duty in the United States. Soon after, the field marshal of the Philippines resigned from the U.S. Army, while numerous members of Congress simply wanted the army to withdraw from the Western Pacific and make the Hawaiian Islands the extent of U.S. influence in that ocean. But MacArthur always had President Roosevelt, who repeatedly called him “our greatest general” (though he told him privately, to his face, that he would be “our worst politician”). And Roosevelt trumped everyone.

  MacArthur and Quezon continued to be “estranged,” with the president of the Philippines now publicly suggesting that the islands were indefensible. MacArthur was irate not only with Quezon but with the politicians in Washington, who continued to refuse to send any arms and had put the islands on a low defensive priority.

  Another loss came when war broke out in Europe on September 1, 1939, and Eisenhower, now a lieutenant colonel, asked to be released and sent back to the States, where he hoped to receive a combat command. MacArthur graciously let him go, and as his replacement he selected Lieutenant Colonel Richard K. “Dick” Sutherland, a gloomy, unctuous Yale graduate, whose father was a retired U.S. senator. Sutherland had some strange political views that didn’t sit well with MacArthur, and one night, at dinner, MacArthur set him straight. Sutherland told the general and several other officers that democracy should be abolished in wartime, that Congress wasted too much time arguing. Elections, he asserted, ought to be eliminated in favor of a presidential dictatorship.

  “No Dick, you are wrong,” MacArthur told him. “Democracy as we have it in the United States is the best form of government that man has ever evolved.” When people have freedom of speech and thought, MacArthur continued, they will keep their minds flexible and progressive. But, he said, in a dictator state freedom disappears and people’s minds become rigid and regimented—“especially in time of war.” Then, the general concluded, “something always goes wrong in the dictator’s plan and the free-thinking people will defeat him.”

  “The trouble with you, Dick, I’m afraid,” MacArthur summed up, “is that you forget that we fight for the ideals and principles of democracy.” Thus ended the lesson for MacArthur’s chief of staff, and nothing more was said of it because Sutherland was just the kind of officer MacArthur wanted for his second in command—crafty, obedient, and ruthless.18

  * At its height, the CCC would employ 2.5 million youths.

  PART III

  BRAVE AS LIONS, BOLD AS BULLS

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THIS MEANS WAR

  During the summer of 1939 the world watched with mounting outrage and distress as Adolf Hitler threatened to bring it to war once more. By then, his Nazi army had absorbed the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia and was threatening to invade Poland, at which point both Britain and France had vowed to take military action.

  The United States was slow in mobilizing its forces; the army was woefully undermanned—perhaps equal only to that of a third-world nation—and the air corps planes and navy ships were mostly outdated. What limited force the country had also lacked anything near the German arsenal of heavy tanks, armored cars, self-propelled artillery, and other mechanized combat vehicles.

  When Hitler at last attacked Poland, U.S. military minds were shocked at the stunning success of the German Blitzkrieg,* which caused the collapse of the Polish army; World War II had thus begun.

  By that time the decision had already been made that Marshall was to be the new U.S. Army chief of staff, and formal ceremonies were scheduled. But those proceedings were hastily canceled in favor of an immediate induction on that fateful September morning, and Marshall was rushed to the War Department on Pennsylvania Avenue next to the White House. At 9 a.m. he raised his right hand before the adjutant general and was sworn in as a permanent major general in the army. Then, following a pause for congratulations and handshaking, he took a second and far more important oath, as a temporary four-star general and chief of staff of the U.S. Army. Then Marshall sped away to the White House for an emergency conference with President Roosevelt and the nation’s top leaders.

  AT A TIME WHEN THE ARMY was trying to expand in response to the deteriorating international situation great military maneuvers were held in various parts of the United States, including Virginia, where Patton was detailed to command a large mobile infantry-cavalry component. He too
k his role very seriously and was judged “superior” by the exercise umpires, yet he still felt himself stuck in place as a colonel and was exasperated that no stars seemed in sight.

  In army maneuvers later that spring, a hastily cobbled together armored division decisively defeated a division of cavalry. It spelled the end of the horse in modern warfare, even though there were clearly not enough armored vehicles to go around, and the isolationist-minded Congress was loath to vote money to build them.

  But then Hitler ended an idle period in what had come to be known as the “phony war,” by attacking and conclusively defeating France, overrunning it in a mere six weeks with yet another powerful blitzkrieg. At last, Hitler had America’s undivided attention. The politicians poured so much money and means into manufacturing that the United States would soon have enough tanks for several large armies.

  Patton’s career, however, remained inert, no matter how many private letters he wrote, how many luncheons and dinners he and Beatrice threw, or how well he now managed to control his manners in public. Outwardly Patton was the model of a well-bred army field officer—gracious, all creased, and spit-and-polished. Inwardly, he seethed.

  IN SEPTEMBER 1940, the Japanese signed a mutual defense agreement with Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. Known as the Tripartite Pact, the three Axis Powers, as they came to be known, promised to come to the defense of one another should they be attacked by any nation not then a belligerent—namely, the United States. When France fell to the Germans, Japan immediately pounced on her East Asian colonies Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, thus putting itself on the flank of the Philippines in the South China Sea. Not only that, the Japanese octopus began to spread its arms even farther south, occupying strings of islands on which they were building air bases. It was becoming evident that they had their eyes next on Indonesia, New Guinea, and the Malay Peninsula.