Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  Certainly the task he had taken on at Camp Mills was all but overwhelming.

  “During August and September,” he wrote later, “the division worked day and night to whip into shape the 27,000 men who had arrived in different stages of training…There were no leaves, passes were limited, officers and men fared alike.” He admired the men’s spirit, their comradeship, and their willing cooperation with officers, many of whom they had never met before, including himself. But even the confirmed workaholic Lieutenant Colonel Douglas MacArthur couldn’t work miracles.49

  Secretary Baker and Major General Tasker Bliss, the army’s new chief of staff, ventured out for an inspection of the Forty-second on September 30, when most of the division had been there barely six weeks. They were impressed by the intensive drills in close and extended order, sighting and aiming exercises, and training in “semaphore and wig wag.” Things broke down, though, during parade review, when one regiment almost collided with another and when the command “eyes right” brought a flurry of hand salutes instead.

  MacArthur shot a stern note around to all commanding officers afterward, but a second Baker-Bliss visit on October 7 did not go much better. An entire regiment, the 168th, got lost on the way to the parade ground and finally showed up when the rest of the review was nearly done. There were more stern notes; what Baker and Bliss thought is not recorded. Yet the Forty-second was leaving for France in just eleven days.50

  Nothing could change that timetable. On the afternoon of October 18, MacArthur and his staff, along with the Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Infantry Brigades as well as the Sixty-seventh Artillery Brigade, began boarding trains for Brooklyn. There they would transfer by ferry to Hoboken to meet the ships that would carry them to France.

  October 1917 marked a new low point for the Allies in the war with Germany. Imperial Russia was collapsing into chaos; Italy was only days away from its worst disaster of the war, the Battle of Caporetto. The western front to which the Americans were headed had been reduced to an empty, devastated landscape, scarred by constant trench warfare. After three years of more or less constant fighting, the front lines had barely moved. The French and British hoped the newly arriving American divisions would change that situation and transform the war. MacArthur hoped they would not guess how inexperienced and unprepared his men really were.

  He himself was now thirty-seven years old and still unmarried. In many ways—his dependence on his mother for emotional support, his reliance on his father’s old comrades for promotion and favors, his self-absorbed touchiness that could not bear the least hint of contradiction or criticism from others, even his superior officers—he was still the young man who had graduated with top honors at West Point but was at bottom an immature boy. But now, even with America on the brink of its greatest overseas conflict, his life was about to change in ways that would have seemed unimaginable, both to himself and to those who knew him, a year or two earlier.

  MacArthur, however, never hesitated. When the General Staff’s chief of engineers reproached him for transferring to the Infantry, warning him he’d soon be back among the engineers, where he had spent his entire career until then, MacArthur had promptly replied, “You are wrong, Colonel. I shall never come back to you.”51

  It was true. Arthur MacArthur’s son was finally going to war.

  CHAPTER 6

  INTO THE FIRE

  Sometimes it is the order one disobeys that makes one famous.

  —DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

  The Covington glided out from New York Harbor on October 18, 1917, and by nightfall was far out in the Atlantic. Because of the U-boat menace, there were no lights, and smoking on deck at night was forbidden since the faint red glow might catch the attention of a German periscope.

  The men of the Forty-second, crammed belowdecks, had to wear life jackets even when they slept in case of submarine attack. Constant zigzagging to throw off any pursuing submarine meant that a trip that should have taken five days took almost two weeks.

  But for Douglas MacArthur, standing in the darkness on deck, listening to the captain’s voice intoning “Rudder right, rudder left,” it was the beginning of his greatest adventure yet. Staring out into the blackness, he imagined he could see the cruiser Chattanooga on which his brother Arthur was serving, among the liner’s armed escorts.

  But in his mind’s eye was also the image of his dead father, and of his still-living mother. He would arrive in France set on one thing: to make himself famous, as his father had, by a combination of bravery and leadership that would make him stand far above his colleagues. He intended to be constantly in the front lines, serving under fire along with his men. This meant that he and the Forty-second could not be sidelined by being placed in reserve. Yet as they finally disembarked at St Nazaire’s harbor on November 1, that was exactly what General Pershing was planning to do.

  —

  Pershing and his staff sensed the desperation in the British and French armies, who wanted the Americans going into action at once, and so he made plans very different from the ones they had drawn up back in the States. They decided that their most experienced divisions of Regular Army troops—the First, Second, and Twenty-sixth—would go up into the line as soon as possible. The rest already in France, including the National Guardsmen of the Forty-second, would be used as replacements for those divisions, and would be fed in, battalion by battalion, as they were needed.

  The news reached MacArthur while he was at the division’s new French headquarters at Vaucouleurs, supervising the arrival of helmets, gas masks, artillery, and ammunition, as well as procuring 50,000 pairs of marching shoes. He was appalled and furious. Headquarters had already snatched away thirty-three of the Rainbow’s best officers to serve in other divisions. Now MacArthur saw that Pershing was not only contemplating the breakup of the entire division, his division, but the plan might mean that he would never see action at all. The image of Douglas MacArthur sitting out the world’s greatest war at a desk handling supply reports and personnel transfers was more than he could stand.1

  He immediately launched a furious lobbying effort, starting with a cable to Secretary Baker and virtually anyone else who had a Washington, D.C., address. “The 42nd had been a uniting force as the nation mobilized for war,” MacArthur argued. Breaking up the army’s one truly national division “would be a shock to the nation.”2 Then he headed up to Chaumont, where Pershing had his headquarters, and burst in on his old friend James Harbord, who had introduced him to Manuel Quezon when they were serving in the Philippines and who now was a brigadier general and Pershing’s chief of staff.

  “Come and see the division,” MacArthur urged him. “Judge for yourself whether such a splendid unit should be relegated to a replacement status.”

  So Harbord did, and he was impressed by what he saw, as MacArthur had known he would be. Conditions at Vaucouleurs were less than ideal, to say the least. The Rainbow artillerymen were housed in barracks previously used by German POWs. The rooms were so infested with lice the men had to strip down to their underwear to be deloused every morning before going to work.3 Yet morale in the division was high and “its training has been on saner lines than any other division like to come,” Harbord wrote afterward in a memo to Pershing, with “no trench or bomb nonsense, [just] straight soldier-making.” Harbord also pointed out that breaking up the Forty-second, “the first division to arrive [in France] complete,” might be politically difficult as well as militarily a mistake. The Rainbow Division “has figured more in the press and has more friends to resent the matter”—both of which were largely the result of MacArthur’s influence.

  Also, if Pershing tried to use it as a replacement division without letting Baker and the War Department know, his decision would almost certainly be reversed. “On the other hand if you ask the War Department…you will not be permitted to do it.”4

  Maybe they should rethink the plan, Harbord concluded. Pershing did. In the end, the Forty-second would remain intact, even as Ch
aumont ordered it to move out of Vaucouleurs for more intensive training. MacArthur’s lobbying had saved the Rainbow from being broken up, even though he knew “my action was probably not in accord with normal procedure.” As a result “it created resentment against me” inside Pershing’s staff that would come back to bite MacArthur more than once.5 But he had made sure that the Forty-second Division would end up in the front line, where there was fighting to be done and glory to be won—both for the living and for the dead.

  —

  MacArthur and the Rainbow celebrated a cold, comfortless Christmas at the new training area, located just north of Pershing’s headquarters of Chaumont. The next day, December 26, they set out in a three-day snowstorm for their final training in the Marne Valley as part of I Corps. The men still had no overcoats and no winter underwear; many were still wearing the shoes they had first donned back in the States, which soon fell apart in the thirty-four-mile hike through the snow. MacArthur marched along with everyone else—something he would do for the rest of the war—and his staff aide, Major Walter Wolf, couldn’t help spotting bloody footprints in the snow. A private that Wolf passed, his feet wrapped in burlap and his pack heaped with ice, muttered bitterly, “Valley Forge—hell! There ain’t no such animal.”

  Yet, Wolf later wrote, “from this march the spirit of the division was born.”6 It would be MacArthur’s fate to constantly command soldiers who had to face extremes of climate as well as the enemy, whether it was the steamy jungles of Bataan and New Guinea or the ice-covered ridges of Korea. It all began with the Rainbow that winter in France.

  Now that the Forty-second was assigned as the active reserve division for I Corps, a new commander had come in to replace Mann, General Charles Menoher. MacArthur proved to be the best chief of staff Menoher could have asked for: “One of the most efficient, energetic, and talented officers I have ever known,” he would write after the war.7

  MacArthur was a whiz at the paperwork, managing reports and personnel with a skill that earned him not only Menoher’s admiration but that of his staff, and even a devotion that would prove a MacArthur trademark, then and later.

  Albert Ettinger, a private from the 165th, found this out as a dispatch rider for MacArthur’s HQ. One night in a driving rain he was carrying a bundle of dispatches for MacArthur when he was nearly run down by a truck, and wound up every few kilometers in the ditch trying to avoid columns of French troops tramping through the mud. When the exhausted and thoroughly saturated private got to battalion HQ, he was met by an astonished officer. “My God, Ettinger, what happened to you?”

  On learning that Ettinger had been sent out in miserable weather for a bundle of very unimportant dispatches, MacArthur got up and went over to shake Ettinger’s hand. “Ettinger,” he said simply and solemnly, “you are a good soldier.”

  “I damn near died,” Ettinger remembered. “Tears came to my eyes. No one, but no one, had ever called me a good soldier….My heart went out to him there and then.”

  Then MacArthur had a sergeant major fetch Ettinger and get him a shower and not only a hot meal—“I mean a good meal,” he ordered—and dry clothes, but sheets and a cot for the night. “I just worshiped the man,” Ettinger wrote later—and that was true for many other men in the Rainbow as well.8

  They certainly knew MacArthur by his appearance, which was unorthodox to an almost insolent degree. Instead of the standard olive-drab tunic of an army officer, MacArthur wore his gray West Point sweater with a blue A stitched in front—a memento of his baseball days at the Point. Instead of the standard gas mask or a sword or pistol, he carried a simple riding crop—“from my life on the plains,” he liked to say. And instead of the classic doughboy steel helmet worn by officers and men alike, he wore a barracks cap tipped at a rakish angle, with the steel liner removed so it crumpled like someone had sat on it.

  And as the war went on, he never changed the MacArthur Look—even when leading troops under fire or in a gas attack. The Look got some laughs, and the feelings of more-buttoned-down officers, including Pershing himself, can be imagined. But it also drew the news cameras, as he knew it would: the time spent working as Secretary Baker’s press agent was paying off. Interviews with Colonel MacArthur accompanied by a photo of him featuring his hat and riding crop, began to dot newspapers around the country—which his mother lovingly collected and pasted into a scrapbook that soon began bulging out the sides.9

  There were others in the army who found The Look refreshing, and even took to imitating parts of it. One of them was his friend from Milwaukee days, airman Billy Mitchell. When he met MacArthur at the front, he was so impressed by the hat minus the steel liner, that he pulled his own out and wore his cap the same way for the rest of the war. From Mitchell it would become the classic headgear of bomber pilots during World War Two, immortalized in photographs and films like Twelve O’Clock High: MacArthur’s legacy not just to the Air Force but to Hollywood.10

  —

  The Look also got its first taste of battle, on February 26, 1918.

  The last week of February MacArthur learned that French troops were planning a surprise raid on German positions along the Meurthe River. He and General Menoher approached the French commander, General Georges de Bazelaire, and asked if they and the brigade commanders could watch, as their first sight of action on the western front.

  Bazelaire said yes and when Menoher left, MacArthur lingered. He had something else to ask the esteemed general. Would he be allowed to go along with the French raiding party doing reconnaissance before the attack? Bazelaire hesitated and would have said no, but MacArthur said, “I cannot fight them if I can’t see them.” So MacArthur got permission to go—but evidently never told Menoher about his plan.11

  That night Menoher, MacArthur, and the others gathered on a low promontory to watch the attack. MacArthur and another staff officer, Captain Thomas Handy, then quietly wandered down the line and met a party of French soldiers who were daubing black cork on their faces. They greeted the Americans like old friends, and a French lieutenant offered them wire clippers and trench knives, which MacArthur and Handy gratefully took. Then after blacking their own faces, they set off for the lip of the forward trench and waited to venture out into No Man’s Land for the first time.

  Trench raids were nightmarish affairs, whether it was a small raid of a few dozen soldiers or a big one with several hundred. There was no supporting artillery, no accompanying mortars or machine guns to help out, sometimes no weapons at all except a pistol and a brace of hand grenades. Yet crossing over to enemy trenches could be as dangerous as the raid itself, especially when the enemy kept the scene lit as bright as day. “The German loves his fireworks party every night,” as another officer in the Forty-second, Major William Donovan, later wrote. German illumination shells and flares, fired at regular intervals throughout the night, gave the blasted black landscape a strange spectral quality—but also made discreet movement difficult, though not impossible.12

  After a couple of nerve-racking hours crawling up to the edge of the German trenches, MacArthur and the raiding party paused. The signal to attack was supposed to be a grenade tossed into the German trenches, but according to MacArthur, at the last minute a German sentry spotted the soldiers huddled in the dark. “His gun flashed in the night,” he wrote. “The alarm spread through the trench, across the front.” As German shells and flares rained overhead, the party charged into the German trenches.

  “The fight was savage and merciless”—just how savage is easy to guess from accounts of other, similar raids.13 The tossed hand grenade, the entrenching tool used as a bludgeon, the men stomped to death in the dark, the sudden pistol shot—except that MacArthur would not even carry a pistol. Then and later, he maintained a strange fetish about carrying a sidearm that might mar the MacArthur Look. The truth was, the Look was more than an outlandish costume. It was visible proof of invulnerability, and a bold challenge to enemies as well as authority. Here I am, it said. See if you can get me.


  A last grenade hurled into a German bunker finally ended the fight as the raiding party headed back to their own lines with an accompanying crowd of prisoners, including a German colonel MacArthur had subdued with his riding stick.

  MacArthur’s hosts congratulated him for having volunteered to come along on their risky mission. “Those veteran Frenchmen crowded around me, shaking my hand, slapping me on the back, and offering me cognac and absinthe.” Eventually MacArthur and Handy got back to their post, where Menoher had been waiting for them. He had not been completely ignorant of what had gone on. “I saw them as they were taking a sneak around the point of a hill,” he wrote in his report, “but said nothing, and we did not see them again until next morning.”14

  The division advocate general, Major Hugh Ogden, wrote in his diary, “We were scared to death” about MacArthur, “fearing something had happened to him.” Instead he came in the HQ for breakfast, set a German spiked helmet he had taken in the raid on the table, and described the raid calmly and casually the way he might describe watching a football game. “He ought to stay back here and not do such crazy stunts,” Ogden thought, but he and the others couldn’t help feeling a sense of admiration—not to mention envy.15

  MacArthur had ignored orders, but it hadn’t done him any harm. General Bazelaire pinned him with a Croix de Guerre, and Menhoer himself recommended him for a Silver Star, which he won.16 Asked about whether his heading off on the raid might have technically violated orders, he answered with a quip: “Sometimes it is the order one disobeys that makes one famous.”