A much sharper break with his childhood came the following year, with the death of his father. It greatly exacerbated what had until now been a minor problem: the demands of his mother. Douglas and his brother remained in Milwaukee after the funeral, trying to comfort and reassure her. They failed. Exhibiting symptoms of a grief syndrome not unknown among the bereaved, she insisted—for the first but by no means the last time—that she was desperately ill. One of them would have to care for her. Since Arthur III was serving aboard ship, it would have to be his brother. Douglas asked the War Department to reassign him to Milwaukee, explaining that his mother’s condition was “alarming,” that she was “seriously ill,” that he was “fearful” of “fatality in this matter.” But Washington hadn’t forgotten the reports of Majors Winslow and Judson; the request was denied, and Douglas moved Pinky to Leavenworth, where, he reported in a new petition, he discovered that “the quarters to which my rank entitles me” were “totally inadequate for the housing of an invalid.” Plainly his mother’s complaints were distracting him. The post doctor noted that for two weeks he had been suffering from sleeplessness. He was exhausted, depressed, unable to eat. His dilemma seemed to be without a solution, his situation analogous to that of Robert E. Lee, who, C. Vann Woodward writes, had been bound to “the invalid mother to whom Robert became a devoted and adoring slave.”66
Then his father reached out from the grave to help him. Though old soldiers really do die, their memory lingers among their comrades. The present Chief of Staff, Major General Leonard Wood, had served with the first Captain MacArthur in Fort Wingate; he remembered Pinky and little Douglas, and learning of their dissatisfaction—the source of his information is unknown, but it may well have been Arthur’s widow—Wood persuaded the new secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, that something must be done. Stimson urged the adjutant general to act “in view of the distinguished service of General Arthur MacArthur.” Thus it happened that three months after his father’s death Douglas MacArthur was transferred to Washington to work directly under Wood. By Christmas he and his mother, miraculously recovered, had moved into the Hadleigh apartment house at Sixteenth and U streets. It would be MacArthur’s second tour of duty in the capital. This time he would be stationed in the heart of the military establishment, with his father’s friend as his sponsor.67
Within a month he had been assigned to temporary duty with the general staff. On May 3, 1913, he was appointed superintendent of the old State, War, and Navy Building—the present Executive Office Building, just across West Executive Avenue from the White House—and on September 25 he was named a member of the general staff. Still unmarried at thirty-three, graceful and trim at 140 pounds, he was among the most eligible bachelors in the capital, but he rarely left the Hadleigh after hours. If his mother hadn’t made it clear to him that he was expected to pick up his father’s fallen standard, he would doubtless have arrived at the same conclusion himself: the flame of zeal burned ever brighter in him; he awaited only an opportunity to prove himself the equal of the hero of Missionary Ridge. One came in the spring of 1914. The United States and Mexico were drifting close to war. The reactionary General Victoriano Huerta had insulted the American flag. On April 22 the secretary of war alerted Wood “to command a possible expeditionary force” if hostilities should break out between the two countries. That was a Wednesday. On Thursday Wood, badly in need of intelligence, decided that he needed a spy and that Captain MacArthur was the very man for the job. MacArthur was ordered “to obtain through reconnaissance and other means consistent with the existing situation all possible information which would be of value with possible operations.” The captain was recovering from acute tonsillitis, but his mother quickly got him out of bed and into uniform. Sailing on the U.S.S. Nebraska, he reached Vera Cruz on Friday, May 1.68
The situation he found there called for both courage and skill. Vera Cruz had been seized by the navy on President Wilson’s orders. The city was occupied by a brigade under the command of Brigadier General Frederick Funston, once Arthur MacArthur’s subordinate in the Philippines. Funston’s troops, under siege, faced eleven thousand of Huerta’s men. If the Mexican commanders knew that the Americans were contemplating an advance, they would certainly attack, for their blood was up; one U.S. private wandering into their lines was executed, a warning of what might happen to MacArthur if his search for information delivered him into hostile hands. Should war break out, on the other hand, Wood would need to know what transportation, if any, the countryside could provide. To further complicate matters, Funston had not been told of MacArthur’s mission. This was for Funston’s own protection. As the brigadier noted in his diary on June 3, he was not “permitted to scout beyond outposts. . . . If a disaster should result from this condition, I must not be held responsible.” MacArthur was responsible to Washington and no one else. However, once he had sized up the problem and decided on a one-man patrol deep into Mexican territory, he confided in several of Funston’s subordinates, including Captain Constant Cordier of the 4th Infantry.69
Captain MacArthur at the time of Vera Cruz, 1914
Vera Cruz lacked horses, mules, and trucks. There was a railroad with plenty of cars but no engines. MacArthur decided to look for engines inland, covering the same ground investigated by another captain of engineers, forty-year-old Robert E. Lee, seventy-seven years earlier. Sobering up an engineer and approaching two railway firemen, he promised the three Mexicans $150 in gold if they would lead him to locomotives. Sending the firemen ahead, he searched the engineer, confiscating a .38-caliber revolver and a small knife. Then he had the engineer search him to prove that he was carrying no money—that murdering him would net the Mexican nothing except MacArthur’s identification tag and a small pistol. At sundown the party left sentinels of the 7th Infantry behind, then proceeded southeastward on a handcar. The handcar had to be abandoned on the shore of the Jamapa River because a railroad bridge there was down. Camouflaging the car, MacArthur and the engineer crossed in a canoe, mounted ponies they found near a small shack, detoured around one community, and, by prearrangement, met the two firemen, who were waiting with another handcar.70
Deeper and deeper they penetrated Huerta country. Since MacArthur was in uniform, and obviously Anglo-Saxon anyway, he left the car as they approached each settlement, lashing one man to him as a guide while he circled the village and met the car with the other two men on the other side. At 1:00 A.M. they reached Alvarado, thirty-five miles beyond Funston’s outposts. There they found five locomotives, two of them useless switch engines but the other three “just what we needed—fine big road pullers in excellent condition except for a few minor parts which were missing. I made a careful inspection of them and then started back.”71
According to him—and his report was largely confirmed by Cordier’s subsequent investigation—the return trip was a bloody affair. At Salinas five armed men opened fire on them. MacArthur dropped two of the attackers with his derringer. At Piedra, where their vision was impeded by a driving mist, they ran into fifteen mounted gunmen. The horsemen put three bullet holes through MacArthur’s clothes and wounded one of his Mexicans; he shot four of the assailants. Near Laguna, three more mounted men fired at them. Again lead tore MacArthur’s uniform; again he brought an attacker down. Recrossing the Jamapa, the canoe sank, and he carried the wounded Mexican to safety. At daybreak they found the concealed handcar and, later in the morning, reentered American lines. That afternoon MacArthur wrote Wood a brief account of his raid, adding: “General Funston is handling things well and there is little room for criticism, but I miss the inspiration, my dear general, of your own clear-cut, decisive methods. I hope sincerely that affairs will shape themselves so that you will shortly take the field for the campaign which, if death does not call you, can have but one ending—the White House.”72
War was not declared, Wood did not take the field, and he never reached the White House, but the Vera Cruz incident discloses much about MacArthur: his ingenuity, h
is eye for terrain, his personal bravery, and his toadying to his superiors. Later he would bestow similar presidential benedictions on other men in a position to give him a leg up. The aftermath of the episode is revealing in another way. Wood recommended him for the Medal of Honor, noting that the expedition, which had been undertaken “at the risk of his life” and “on his own initiative,” showed “enterprise and courage worthy of high commendation.” An awards board rejected the recommendation on the ground that since Funston hadn’t known about the reconnaissance, decorating Captain MacArthur “might encourage any other staff officer, under similar conditions, to ignore the local commander, possibly interfering with the latter’s plans with reference to the enemy.” That was absurd, and the captain was entitled to resent it, but he went further, submitting an official memorandum protesting “the rigid narrow-mindedness and lack of imagination” of the awards board. It availed him nothing, merely strengthening the convictions of those who saw him as a temperamental special pleader.73
He would always be his own worst enemy. Yet his gifts were so great that he repeatedly triumphed in spite of himself. Returning from Mexico he was reappointed to the general staff and, on December 11, 1915, promoted to major. As American participation in the European war became ever likelier, he worked on programs for national defense and on economic mobilization plans with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. The army’s new Chief of Staff, Hugh L. Scott, noted in an efficiency report that “Major MacArthur is a . . . high-minded, conscientious and unusually efficient officer, well fitted for positions requiring diplomacy and high-grade intelligence.” When he chose, he could be as engaging as, on other occasions, he was supercilious and headstrong, and it was his genial qualities which accounted for his rise in the last months of peace. With increasing frequency he was designated guide for visiting officers from other countries. After passage of the National Defense Act of 1916, which among other things provided for a 400,000-man National Guard, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker appointed MacArthur his military assistant, with special responsibility for a new bureau of information. In July he was named press censor and became, as he put it, “the liaison link with the newspaper men who covered the War Department”—in other words, a public-relations officer.74
In that role he arranged interviews and issued press releases setting forth the department’s views on military policy, on bills before Congress, and on Brigadier General Pershing’s pursuit of Pancho Villa in Mexico. Nine months later, when America entered the war against Germany, twenty-nine reporters publicly expressed their appreciation for the manner in which their liaison officer had “dealt with us for all these months in his trying position of military censor. We feel no doubt of what the future holds for Major MacArthur. Rank and honors will come to him if merit can bring them to any man; but we wish to say our thanks to him for the unfailing kindness, patience and wise counsel we have received from him in the difficult days that are past. . . . If wise decisions are reached eventually as to the military policy of our country, we cannot but feel that the Major has helped, through us, to shape the public mind.”75
The first big decision was to induct young men into the army by lottery. Here, too, MacArthur played a key part. In the later opinion of Colonel R. Ernest Dupuy, MacArthur’s actions “went far to condition the nation and the Congress for the seemingly impossible: a draft act. Make no mistake; it was the then Major Douglas MacArthur . . . who sold to the American people the selective service act that was passed on May 18, 1917. ”76
Next came the question of whether National Guard formations should fight. A departmental study urged that the guard be bypassed—that a half-million men be drafted into the regular army instead. When the paper came to MacArthur, “I was tired from overwork and indiscreetly endorsed it saying that I completely disagreed with its conclusions, but would not attempt to detail my reasons, as I felt no one would give them the slightest attention.” He was right about the Chief of Staff, but wrong about Secretary Baker, who shared his faith in citizen soldiers. Calling him in, Baker said: “Get your cap. We are going to the White House to place the whole question before the President for his decision.” For over an hour the two men pressed their case upon Wilson, recommending “employment of the National Guard to its full capacity.” At the end the President said: “I am in general accord with your ideas. Baker, put them into effect. And thank you, Major, for your frankness.”77
The guard was political, however, and required delicate treatment. Baker was aware, as he later said, that “public psychology was still an uncertain and mystifying factor.” Which state’s troops should be sent to France first? There seemed to be no way the War Department could win this one. Parents in the designated state might protest that their boys were being marked for early sacrifice. On the other hand, guardsmen in other states might resent not being given first crack at the Germans. The secretary laid the problem before MacArthur and Brigadier General William A. Mann, who headed the department’s militia bureau. MacArthur suggested forming a division of units from several states. The brigadier, agreeing, observed that troops might be drawn from as many as twenty-six states. Then, in Baker’s words, “Major MacArthur, who was standing alongside, said, ‘Fine, that will stretch over the whole country like a rainbow.’ The division thus got its name.”78
Major MacArthur as a War Department public-relations man, 1916
Mann was chosen commander of the Rainbow Division—officially the 42nd Division. Since the brigadier was approaching retirement, MacArthur suggested that the best colonel on the general staff be appointed his chief of staff. Baker said to him: “I have already made my selection for that post. It is you.” MacArthur diffidently pointed out that he was only a major and therefore ineligible. Baker, putting an arm on his shoulder, said, “You are wrong. You are now a colonel. I will sign your commission immediately. I take it you will want to be in the Engineer Corps.” MacArthur replied, “No, the infantry. “ Afterward he explained that he had been prompted by his father’s service in the old 24th Wisconsin. Others have suggested that he knew wartime promotions came more rapidly to officers of the line. At all events, Colonel William M. Black, the chief of engineers, was furious. Summoning MacArthur, he told him that the switch was improper. The new colonel politely told him he was wrong. Black warned him, “Beware, young man. You will be coming back to me before long.” Smiling, MacArthur shook his head and said: “Again you are wrong, Colonel. I shall never come back to you.”79
TWO
Charge
1917 – 1918
In 1917 France’s most striking geographic feature was a double chain of snakelike trenches which began on the English Channel and ended 466 miles away on the Swiss border. Facing one another across the no-man’s-land between these earthworks, the great armies squatted on the western front amid the stench of urine, feces, and decaying flesh, living troglodytic lives in candlelit dugouts and sandbagged ditches hewn from Fricourt chalk or La Bassée clay, or scooped from the porridge of swampy Flanders. They had been there since the summer of 1914, when the gray tide of the German army had swept through Belgium, lapped at the breakwater of Verdun, recoiled on the Marne at the very gates of Paris, and receded to the Aisne. The efficient Prussians had then settled down to teach French children German while the Allies furiously counterattacked.1
The titanic struggles which followed had been called battles, but although they had been fought on a fantastic scale, with nearly two million men lost at Verdun and on the Somme, strategically they were only siege assaults. Every attack found the defenses of the kaiser’s troops stronger. The poilus and Tommies who crawled over their parapets, lay down in front of the jump-off tapes, and waited for their officers’ zero-hour whistles, would face as many as ten aprons of barbwire with barbs thick as a man’s thumb, backed by the teeming Boche. A few trenches would be taken at shocking cost—one gain of seven hundred mutilated yards cost twenty-six thousand men—and then the siege would start again. Newspapers in London
and Paris spoke of “hammer blows” and “big pushes,” but the men knew better; a soldier’s mot had it that the war would last a hundred years, five years of fighting and ninety-five of winding up the barbwire.
It was a weird, grimy life, unlike anything in their sheltered upbringing except, perhaps, the stories of Jules Verne. There were poignant reminders of prewar days—the birds that caroled over the lunar landscape each watery dawn, the big yellow poplar forests behind the lines—but most sounds and colors on the front were unearthly. Bullets cracked and ricochets sang with an iron ring; overhead, shells warbled endlessly. There were saffron shrapnel puffs, snaky yellowish mists of mustard gas souring the ground, and spectacular Very flares of all hues. Little foliage survived here. Trees splintered to matchwood stood in silhouette against the lowering sky. Arriving draftees were shipped up in boxcars built for hommes 40 or chevaux 8 and marched over duckboards to their new homes in the earth, where everything revolved around the trench—you had a trench knife, a trench cane, a rod-shaped trench periscope and, if you were unlucky, trench foot, trench mouth, or trench fever.
Even in uncontested sectors there was a steady toll of shellfire casualties—the methodical British called it “normal wastage. The survivors were those who developed quick reactions to danger. An alert youth learned to sort out the whines that threatened him, though after a few close ones, when his ears buzzed and everything turned scarlet, he realized that the time might come when ducking would do no good. If he was a machine gunner he knew that his life expectancy in combat had been calculated at thirty minutes, and in time he became detached toward death and casual with its appliances. He would remove cartridges at the right places in machine-gun belts so that the weapon would rap out familiar rhythms, such as “Shave and a haircut—two bits.” Enemy lines would be sprayed with belt after belt from water-cooled barrels to heat the water for soup. If the Germans were known to be low on canister and improvising, the trenches would be searched eagerly after a shelling to see whether the enemy had thrown over anything useful. Sometimes you could find handy screws, the cogwheels of a clock, or even a set of false teeth that just might fit. Such shellings were symbolic of the whole conflict—grotesque, impersonal, obscene, ghastly. The war was, quite simply, the worst thing that had ever happened.
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