by Perry, Mark
In the wake of Arnold’s mission, MacArthur decided that while he disagreed with the call for an independent air force, the establishment of a separate air headquarters inside the army was essential. To this end, he convinced Secretary of War Dern to appoint a civilian board to study how to most effectively use the army air corps. The board was headed up by former Secretary of War Newton Baker and included as a part of its mandate the identification of a replacement for Foulois. When the Baker board recommended the creation of a “General Headquarters, Air Force,” which would report directly to the chief of staff, MacArthur not only endorsed the decision, but also appointed Brigadier General Frank Andrews to head it. MacArthur’s appointment of Andrews came as a shock, for while the two had graduated from West Point within a year of each other, Andrews disliked MacArthur, blaming him for the air arm’s meager funding. For once, MacArthur brushed aside this personal animus and gave Andrews the job. Andrews was the air arm’s Fox Conner, the new U.S. Army Air Forces’ leading strategic thinker. But while Conner envisioned armies of tanks racing across the fields of northern France, Andrews envisioned fleets of aircraft flying over them.
The Arnold mission and the Baker report reinforced MacArthur’s new thinking on the future of warfare and the importance of tanks and bombers in the U.S. arsenal. But he had not yet constructed a model to explain how these newer, bigger, and more lethal machines would be used. So beginning in August 1934, the distant, alien, and still unwanted figure of the Roosevelt administration, the man who came, smiled, and then left White House receptions—and who did battle with congressman Ross Collins—simply disappeared. Not only did MacArthur not show up for work at his office late in the morning, as was his habit, but some days, he didn’t show up at all. Instead, he spent day after day by himself, in his library at Quarters Number One, his official residence across the Potomac River at Fort Myer. He was reading.
Douglas MacArthur’s command of facts was prodigious. As a commander in the Great War, he studied intelligence documents and briefed his subordinates on their contents. He spoke of the strength of the enemy, its commanders, its weaponry, its defenses, the terrain features the Americans would encounter, the plan they should follow, the obstacles they would face—and all without the use of a single note. MacArthur read voraciously, a habit seeded in a childhood surrounded by books. Arthur MacArthur owned a library of some four thousand volumes, which his son inherited. These books the son moved, box by box, through each of his assignments until finally, when he was named chief of staff, they adorned the shelves of his Fort Myer home. To these MacArthur proudly added his own collection of military memoirs, biographies, and popular histories. A remnant of that early collection remains today at the MacArthur archives in Norfolk, Virginia. Included are dozens of volumes that MacArthur read in late 1934, as he searched for a strategy that the army might adopt in a future war.
Among the volumes of books that MacArthur read during the late summer of 1934 were the classic standards of any military library: Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Jomini. But they stand relatively pristine next to the several dozen well-thumbed accounts of Napoleon’s campaigns. For the nonspecialist, these are dense tomes, minute-by-minute accounts of the movements of regiments and brigades, divisions and entire armies, complete with maps. For an era consumed with endless recollections of America’s own Civil War, including biographies of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Ulysses S. Grant, MacArthur’s tastes were decidedly European. It was Napoleon, and not Lee or Jackson, whom he admired, quoted, followed. Throughout his life, MacArthur cited and repeated Napoleon’s aphorisms, made continued references to his campaigns and battles, outlined his thinking, reviewed the accounts of his numerous victories—and referred to him again and again as history’s greatest captain. What MacArthur admired in Napoleon was his ability to handle enormous numbers of troops over vast distances. More than simply a matter of giving orders, Napoleon’s skill involved an intimate knowledge of how well the soldiers could pin an enemy in place and then surround it, force its retreat, or position it for annihilation. “Are you lucky?” Napoleon would ask his commanders—and so, too, throughout his career, would MacArthur.
Historians cannot know the inner lives of their subjects, but the inner life of Douglas MacArthur undoubtedly lies somewhere in the pages of those books in Norfolk. In the late summer of 1934, he spent every day reading through them, conducting a quiet and personal military tutorial. Slowly, but inexorably, what he read was reflected in his reports to George Dern and Franklin Roosevelt. In the midst of his studies, he wrote to Dern that he believed the next war would be dominated by tanks and aircraft, a wholly unique view for a veteran of the ghastly inch-by-inch trench fighting of World War One: “The nation that does not command the air will face deadly odds. Armies and navies to operate successfully must have air cover.” The shift in MacArthur’s thinking within just a few months was astonishing. But now, in his Fort Myer library, he analyzed not simply how to bring airpower onto the battlefield, but also how to most effectively coordinate air, land, and sea assets as a unified battle of all arms. It was something that had never been done in the history of warfare.
MacArthur was struck by what he read in a compelling biography of Genghis Khan, the Asian conqueror who used speed and surprise to overwhelm his foes. While MacArthur never cited which biography of Khan he read, it was undoubtedly Harold Lamb’s Genghis Khan: Emperor of All Men—still there, in Norfolk, its pages frayed with use. While not scholarly, Lamb’s account of Khan’s tactics was insightful, and the descriptions of how the Mongol conqueror deployed his soldiers made for fascinating, if romanticized, reading. Khan’s deployment of his foot soldiers, with his cavalry on their tough little ponies as outliers, had a marked impact on MacArthur’s thinking and was reflected in his own rapidly evolving strategic views. Here in Lamb’s narrative, MacArthur believed, lay the key to using tanks, light mobile units, and aircraft as weapons that could leap ahead of static armies, cut off and starve large military formations, and strike deep into enemy territory. Most important of all, Khan had deployed his horde as an army of maneuver. Swift and self-sustaining, it conquered vast stretches of territory and brought two empires to their knees. The key was speed and mobility, with large weapons an encumbrance, frontal assaults suicidal, and sieges a thing of the past. For Khan, massed attacks expended the one resource he couldn’t afford to lose: his own men.
MacArthur began to write down his own thoughts on the future of warfare and planned to include these ideas in a report to Dern and Roosevelt when he retired. The report was begun that summer at Fort Myer, but was only perfected after much thinking and rewriting and many more weeks of reading. Although the report would not be released until the next year, it reflected the research that MacArthur had conducted from August until November 1934:
He [Khan] devised an organization appropriate to conditions then existing; he raised the discipline and morale of his troops to a level never known in any other army, unless possibly that of Cromwell; he spent every available period of peace to develop subordinate leaders and to produce perfection of training throughout the army, and, finally, he insisted upon speed in action, a speed which by comparison with other forces of his day was almost unbelievable. Though he armed his men with the best equipment of offense and defense that the skill of Asia could produce, he refused to encumber them with loads that would immobilize his army. Over great distances his legions moved so rapidly and secretly as to astound his enemies and practically to paralyze their powers of resistance. He crossed great rivers and mountain ranges, he reduced walled cities in his path and swept onward to destroy nations and pulverize whole civilizations. On the battlefield his troops maneuvered so swiftly and skillfully and struck with such devastating speed that times without number they defeated armies overwhelmingly superior to themselves in number.
When it was released, in the late summer of 1935, the report garnered more attention than MacArthur might have hoped. While his peers included senior officers who wer
e themselves studying how to use tanks, fighters, and bombers, military theorists had different views. The theorists remained stuck in the Great War, where lieutenants and captains ordered their soldiers over the lips of their trenches—and to their deaths. The conflicting views of warfare were not a surprise. The armies of the Great War had been commanded by senior officers who were stuck in the past and who believed that cavalry charges would tip the balance against the enemy. Those who fought disagreed: They thought that masses of infantry would make the difference. But neither was right. The next war would be a war of maneuver and devastating speed—and of air attacks.
Writing in the London Times, military theorist B. H. Liddell Hart reflected on the MacArthur report. There is an almost palpable sense of relief in Hart’s words: Someone in America had finally noticed that a war was coming, and was thinking about how to fight it. Citing MacArthur’s reputation as a combat commander, Hart focused on the general’s new thinking: “In the war he [MacArthur] made his reputation as a commander in the historic tradition: one who pushed right forward himself in order to keep his finger on the pulse of the battle and seize opportunities. General MacArthur’s present report shows that in the field of military theory he is no less forward in ideas. No more progressive summary of modern military conditions, and the changes now developing, has appeared from the authoritative quarters of any army.” This was high praise, though MacArthur was not alone in seeing the outlines of the next conflict. Fox Conner, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Marshall saw it, as did George Patton, Benny Foulois, and Frank Andrews. So too did Franklin Roosevelt.
As Douglas MacArthur was struggling to find a new strategy for the American army, Franklin Roosevelt continued his battle against the Great Depression. The battle was not going well: In mid-May 1934, a two-day storm in the Great Plains had inaugurated the nation’s Dust Bowl era, displacing tens of thousands of farmers and taking millions of acres out of agricultural production. Soil from as far away as Kansas was deposited on the streets of Chicago, as a long drought settled in from Texas to South Dakota. Unemployment still hovered at just over 21 percent, tens of thousands of businesses were still closed, and productive capacity remained at a standstill. But while 1934 is remembered as one of America’s darker years, it also marks an unrecognized turning point in history. In early 1934, Japan annexed Manchuria, which the Japanese had conquered in 1931, and renamed it Manchukuo. On May 1, Austria became a fascist state, and one month later, the new German government opened its first concentration camp. In August, Adolf Hitler was named führer of Germany. And during the waning months of 1934, Franklin Roosevelt allowed Dern and MacArthur to submit to Congress an increase in army spending for 1936. In so doing, Roosevelt began America’s slow but certain pivot to war. MacArthur was surprised by Roosevelt’s decision, but he prepared himself for what he knew would come next: an attempt by officials in the Bureau of the Budget to cut by $30 million the president’s $361 million proposal. But Roosevelt’s silence on the issue was a clear signal to MacArthur that if the army chief could sell the proposed increases to Congress, the president was willing to go along.
Even with Roosevelt on the sidelines, MacArthur had to tread carefully. Ross Collins was still in charge of the House Subcommittee on Military Appropriations and still intent on giving the chief of staff his comeuppance. But MacArthur had his own card to play; he was willing to allow officer billets to remain at their current levels, he told Collins, as long as the army gained a significant increase in enlisted strength. MacArthur’s proposal would increase the size of the army from 119,000 to 165,000 men, and like a number of MacArthur’s previous initiatives, it had the support of veterans’ groups. This was not news to Collins, who had learned that playing the Bonus March card had its limitations. Consequently, the Mississippi Democrat offered a compromise, telling MacArthur that he would agree to the increase if it were left to the discretion of the president. MacArthur turned him down. He didn’t want the anti-MacArthur lobby in the administration to press the president on the issue, and neither did he want to give the Bureau of the Budget another chance to sideline Roosevelt’s own recommendations. So he told Collins that he didn’t think it was necessary to “burden” Roosevelt with the issue. Surprisingly, Collins yielded, undoubtedly calculating that as MacArthur had shown a willingness to accede on the question of officer billets, Collins could give something back. The final bill gave MacArthur his victory—it wasn’t the $361 million he had counted on, but at $355.5 million, it was close enough.
MacArthur celebrated the victory as well as the press commentary that greeted it. Congress, one reporter wrote, “voted MacArthur virtually everything he wanted.” The New York Times, however, was closer to the mark when it noted that the increases in military spending were a reflection of events in Europe and “prevalent war talk.” But even with much of the world preparing for conflict, the real reason for the increase in the military budget was MacArthur’s new status as Roosevelt’s choice to continue as chief of staff.
MacArthur had been due for retirement at the end of 1934, but in August of that year (as MacArthur was retreating to his library at Fort Myer), Roosevelt began thinking about retaining him in the same position. The president’s reflections would have shocked MacArthur, who told Eisenhower that his replacement “was a certainty.” Not surprisingly, Roosevelt’s closest advisors again opposed the move. They had weighed in twice against MacArthur before, just after Roosevelt’s inauguration and then again at the end of 1933, but this time their objections were strident. They agreed that it would have been politically difficult to remove MacArthur just after Roosevelt had become president and even more difficult during the first year of his presidency. Still, reappointing MacArthur now would signal that Roosevelt had decided to keep him on for the president’s four-year term.
Worried about Roosevelt’s thinking, an exasperated Josephus Daniels penned yet another anti-MacArthur warning. “Secretary Dern asked me what I would do if I were Secretary of War,” Daniels wrote in a letter to Roosevelt. “I said: ‘Get a whole new Chief of Staff and a whole new set up in the Department just as soon as possible.’” The journalist then revived the argument he had made two years earlier. “MacArthur is a charming man,” he wrote, “but he was put in by your predecessor and thinks he should run the Army.” Daniels repeated that MacArthur was still opposed by veterans for his Anacostia actions: “The appointment of MacArthur would be deeply resented. My earnest advice is ‘Don’t.’”
Not surprisingly, given John Pershing’s argument with MacArthur over George Marshall, Pershing then weighed in on the side of Daniels. Pershing argued that Roosevelt should appoint an old friend, Malin Craig, as the new army chief. Craig was the most qualified officer to replace MacArthur, Pershing told Roosevelt. The only other possible MacArthur replacement was George Simonds, a MacArthur protégé.
But Roosevelt wasn’t any more convinced by Daniels’s arguments now than he had been two years earlier. Avoiding a fight with the Republicans was still a necessity, and MacArthur had not proven to be a liability. The president was even less influenced by Pershing, for while Malin Craig was an experienced and respected officer, Craig had used his influence inside the military to convince his fellow officers to vote for Hoover—an action so inappropriate that not even MacArthur had dared trying it. Nor did Roosevelt like General George Simonds, a MacArthur partisan who was commandant of the Army War College. Simonds coveted the chief of staff position and lobbied inside the army to ensure that his name was put forward.
Roosevelt was also influenced by Congress, a number of whose members were suddenly speaking up on MacArthur’s behalf. Their unexpected endorsement was the result of the chief of staff’s careful cultivation of members who appreciated his willingness to keep his disagreement with the New Deal under wraps. Among these was Senator Morris Sheppard, an influential Texas prohibitionist who had been a key ally of Roosevelt in passing child labor and rural credit legislation. Sheppard was perhaps the oddest of all of Roosevelt’s
political allies: He was a conservative Southern Democrat who worried about Roosevelt’s progressivism, but supported the president’s programs because the senator couldn’t abide the Republicans. Then too, while Sheppard was a Southern conservative, his career included relentless campaigning on behalf of the women’s vote (that he had three daughters might have had something to do with this), which endeared him to the First Lady, a not inconsiderable ally. Sheppard told Roosevelt in midsummer that he hoped “very much that MacArthur would be retained,” a message repeated by House Majority Leader Joseph Byrnes. In July, Byrnes joined Sheppard in pushing Roosevelt into the MacArthur camp. “It is not necessary for me in this note to you,” Byrnes wrote to Roosevelt, “to say anything more concerning General MacArthur and his ability than that I consider him the best fitted than any in the country for this position.”
Always careful to explain his actions to his allies, particularly his most dedicated New Deal supporters, Roosevelt pocketed these endorsements and kept his silence. Even when pushed to announce whom he had in mind as MacArthur’s replacement, Roosevelt shrugged. His apparent indecision remained through all of October and November as senior army officers maneuvered to put themselves in position to gain Roosevelt’s attention. But on December 12, Roosevelt announced that he had made a decision. “Lots of news to report today,” he told the press. “No. 1, I have sent a letter to the Secretary of War directing that General Douglas MacArthur be retained as Chief of Staff until his successor has been appointed. I am doing this in order to obtain the benefit of General MacArthur’s experience in handling War Department legislation in the coming session.” The press was stunned: There had been no intimation of what Roosevelt was contemplating, and nearly everyone knew of the opposition to MacArthur among Roosevelt’s top advisors. But in making the announcement, Roosevelt conceded that he didn’t think of MacArthur as serving another four-year term, saying only that the general would be retained until the end of the current session of Congress.