They were words he would make into a career.
—
On March 1, the Forty-second made its first move into the trenches, and on March 9 the Rainbows made their first over-the-top advance, with the Iowans of the 168th leading the way.
Zero hour was five o’clock plus five minutes. French artillery zeroed in on their targets along the front, prepared to pound five minutes before the men of the Rainbow were due to attack. The Germans, sensing what was coming, struck first, with a counterbarrage of their own that swept over the Rainbow trenches like a tornado of flame.
The Iowans hunkered down as the shells screamed and burst overhead and chunks of steel flew in all directions. Then some of them noticed a strange figure in their midst, dressed in a turtleneck sweater and muffler and carrying a riding crop. When someone offered him a pistol and a helmet, he refused.
“I couldn’t figure out what a fellow dressed like that was doing out there,” a private remembered. “When I found out who he was, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”17
It was MacArthur.
“There was a cold drizzle,” MacArthur remembered, “the air was sharp with coming storm, the mud ankle deep….I began to feel uneasy. You never really know about men at such a time. They were not professionals. Few of them had ever been under fire.” He started to walk the line, steadying the men amid the chill and the wet and the explosions in the darkness.
Then MacArthur’s watch hand hit five of five. “The night trembled with the thunderous belch of sixty batteries,” as the French gunners answered the German barrage.18
Around him were officers and sergeants with whistles in their teeth, waiting for the signal.
The barrage went on until two minutes past five. Then three minutes, five minutes. The French gunners started lowering their gun sights as zero hour approached, and the next round of steel landed just in front of the Americans’ line. It was the start of the “creeping barrage” that would accompany the Americans all the way to the German trenches, to blast away anything in their path.
“All ready, Casey?” MacArthur shouted to F Company’s battalion commander, Captain Charles Casey.
“Okay, Colonel,” Casey bellowed back. A chorus of whistles sprang up and down the line.
“Up you go,” Casey urged his men. “Keep alignment. Guide is right. Don’t rush or you’ll get your own barrage on your neck!”
Four thousand Americans hurled themselves out of their trenches. “I went over the top as fast as I could,” MacArthur remembered, “and scrambled forward.” The blast from the creeping barrage ahead “was like a fiery furnace.” Then his uneasiness returned.
“For a dozen terrible seconds I felt they were not following me. But then, without turning around, I knew how wrong I was….In a moment they were around me, ahead of me, a roaring avalanche of glittering steel and cursing men.”19
The cursing, swarming men were his Iowans, moving relentlessly toward the German trenches. Many fell, but many more bounded through the broken, tangled German wire. “We carried the enemy position,” MacArthur wrote later—the brief words barely disguising the sense of triumph and exultation. It was his first full-scale action and a tiny victory by western front standards, but it was a foretaste of what the Forty-second could do when it was ably led.
He was immensely impressed by the Iowans’ performance. The 168th had served under his father in the Philippines, and Douglas told some fellow officers now, “Is it any wonder my father was so proud of this regiment?”20 A French staff officer who had watched the Americans under fire, told MacArthur in awed tones, “They conduct themselves like veterans. I have never seen better morale.”21
“From then on,” MacArthur would write, with a touch of exaggeration enhanced by pride, “the Rainbow was rated by both friend and foe a fighting ace.” So was its chief of staff, who won a Distinguished Service Cross for the action and a new nickname: “the Fighting Dude.”
—
The Fighting Dude, the Beau Brummell of the AEF, the d’Artagnan of the Army. The nicknames expressed a certain amusement but also a growing respect, as it became clear that MacArthur’s outlandish costume was backed by the real goods. Menoher’s recommendation for the Distinguished Service Cross said as much. “In the face of the determined and violent resistance of the enemy,” it read, “he lent actual advice on the spot to the unit commanders, and by his supervision of the operation not only guaranteed its success” but let everyone in the Forty-second know that their chief of staff was with them not just in spirit but in the flesh—even when the shells were falling and the machine-gun bullets were flying.22
On March 20 the Forty-second sustained its first massive gas attack. The shells loaded with German mustard gas rained down on their positions just as they were preparing for another trench raid. The men of the 165th got the worst of it, especially those in K Company. More than four hundred found themselves blinded and choking: mustard gas, Private Ettinger remembered later, wasn’t fatal, but it burned any part of the body that secreted moisture, like the eyes, the mouth, the lungs, hair under the helmet’s sweatband, and even the genitals. Men who hadn’t gotten their gas masks on in time lay helpless on the road for hours, blind and in severe pain, as medics passed from one huddled group to the next.23
Mustard gas wasn’t fatal, but phosgene gas was, and MacArthur had gotten a faceful of it in a German attack three days earlier. His refusal to carry a gas mask had finally caught up with him, and while he rated it a “slight gassing” and recovered in less than a week, the reports that got back to his mother made her frantic.
She had left Washington and was now living with his brother Arthur’s family in Santa Barbara, and garbled newspaper reports that MacArthur had been “severely wounded” led her to send a cablegram to General Pershing himself. Pershing took the time to straighten the story out and replied to her that all was well.
“Only God alone knows how great the comfort your reassuring message was to me,” she wrote back to Pershing, “and I thank you right from the core of my heart….We know your courage and ability—and realize you are the right man—in the right place.”24
In fact, MacArthur had recovered well enough to accompany Newton Baker on a tour of the front on March 19, just the day before the main German gas attack. The secretary of war had secretly hoped he might see some real action, and on his tour of the lines held by his fellow Ohioans of the 166th, he did. A German 105 mm shell slammed down out of the sky about seventy-five feet from his touring car.
“That was a shell, wasn’t it?” Baker said eagerly.
“Yes!” bellowed MacArthur, as he frantically tried to push Baker back into his car to get him out of the area.
“Then I may say I’ve been under fire, mayn’t I?” the pacifist from Cleveland chortled delightedly. The incident made his French tour.
Baker was equally delighted with his former protégé. MacArthur regaled him with stories of his daring trench raids, and even presented him with the brass helmet of a Bavarian officer he had taken in one of them, which Baker sent along to Douglas’s mother.25 MacArthur, the secretary of war later told a group of correspondents, was “the most brilliant young officer in the army.”
But the Fighting Dude was just getting started.
—
On March 21, the day after the mustard gas attack on the Rainbow, the entire western front came alive.
The predawn sky lit up over a fifty-mile front, as massed German artillery belched forth a bombardment of shrapnel, high explosives, and chemical weapons, and the morning mist grew green with phosgene, chlorine, and mustard gas.
Seventy-six German divisions, many of them fresh from victory over Russia on the eastern front, erupted from their trenches and poured out toward the Allied lines between La Bassée in the south and Dixmude in the north, where the British Fifth Army had only twenty-eight divisions. Only an hour after the attack began, the Germans had opened a chasm in the British lines almost twelve miles wide; by noon the
y had reached the Fifth Army’s main battle line, where resistance was fierce but increasingly desperate. That afternoon, resistance all but collapsed; as the sun finally set, the war in the west had taken a dangerous new turn.26
Over the next four days the forty-mile-wide and forty-mile-deep advance was propelling the British to the brink of collapse, and with it the entire Allied cause. An emergency meeting was held at Doullens near Amiens—once the anchor of the Allied rear but now only twenty miles from the German advance. It was attended by France’s president and prime minister as well as leading British and French generals. When the conversation paused, the participants could hear the German guns in the distance. Everything now had to be thrown into steadying the line, they decided, including the Americans—whether they were ready or not.
General Pershing immediately put his four divisions at their disposal. The First Division moved up into the line near Cantigny on the British front. The Second and Third, which included two regiments of marines, swung into the French sector, where eventually the marines would launch a bloody counterattack on German lines at Belleau Wood in June.
Meanwhile, Pershing’s evaluation of the Forty-second was that they were still not ready for full front-line service. But he did note that the division’s chief of staff was “a bright young chap—full of life and go who will soon settle down and make a name for himself”—MacArthur, of course—and had to admit that the division “performed its work with excellent spirit and aggressiveness” and had won the respect and admiration of the French. So as the crisis mounted, Pershing ordered the Forty-second to the fortified line around the town of Baccarat to relieve three French divisions heading north to protect Paris from the onrushing German tide.27
The men of the Forty-second held the Baccarat line from March 31 until June 21. There were no major offensives or battles, but it was no rest stop. As Menoher told his officers, “When we get into sector we will take over No Man’s Land. We will take it over and keep it.” And with MacArthur at its head, that was exactly what the Rainbow did.
“For eighty-two days,” MacArthur wrote later, “the division was in almost constant combat.” Most of it took the form of trench raids of between a couple of dozen and a couple of hundred soldiers rushing across No Man’s Land into the enemy trenches, to shoot up Germans and take prisoners, and then scramble back to their own lines as artillery shells exploded around them. In the first two weeks of June alone there were more than ninety such raids, along with “extended patrols” that carried the Americans right to the edge of the German barbed wire.28
MacArthur participated in as many as he could. He did so without orders, and some thought he was being more reckless than daring. But his recklessness had collaborators in men like Colonel Frank McCoy, commander of the 165th New Yorkers and his First Battalion commander Major William Donovan, who enjoyed his own unauthorized trench raids. Menoher and the Eighty-third’s Brigadier Charles Lenihan also secretly encouraged the Fighting Dude. Donovan once even declared it would be “a blamed good thing” if MacArthur managed to get himself shot while up in the line. It’ll be a huge boost to American morale, Donovan declared, provoking gales of laughter in the dugout that night. But as Father Duffy noted, “All five of them are wild Celts, whose opinion no sane man like myself would uphold.”29
Over those three months the Forty-second slowly mastered the routine of trench warfare: the dawn stand-to, the patrols and cleaning and reinforcing trenches and dugouts, responding quickly to sudden gas attacks or artillery bombardments, and the inevitable patrols and raids after dark, when the Americans would return disappointed if they didn’t find any Germans to shoot or capture. MacArthur saw that as a sign of high morale and unit pride. It proved once again that as far as modern warfare went, Americans were more than up for the challenge. “American citizen soldiers could take their place beside the best troops the war had produced,” wrote his friend Major Henry Reilly, later the division’s official historian, “and equal their best performance.”30
But it came at a price: the division suffered almost 2,000 casualties during the three months in Baccarat. No other officer risked life and limb more than MacArthur, and his commanding officer noticed it. In his official report Menoher pronounced MacArthur “a most brilliant officer” and noted how his “excellent staff work” had made the division into “a complete, compact, cohesive, single unit which ran like a well-oiled machine.”
General Pershing himself, however, took a different view.
On June 16 he sent orders to Menoher and MacArthur to prepare the division to entrain for the Champagne front, where they would be assigned to the French Fourth Army under General Henri Gouraud. He showed up on a surprise inspection on June 21 at the loading ramp in the train station at Charmes, just as the loading of artillery caissons, medical supplies, tents, and personal gear was reaching a pandemonious climax.
He strode straight up to MacArthur, who was supervising the sweaty work, and who threw out a surprised salute. Pershing glared, his famous white mustache bristling with rage.
“This division is a disgrace,” he barked. “The men are poorly disciplined and they are not properly trained. The whole outfit is just about the worst I’ve seen.”
MacArthur stood in stunned amazement. Soldiers and junior officers were clustered around the loading ramp, listening to every word as the commander in chief reamed out the Fighting Dude inch by inch.
“MacArthur,” Pershing rasped loudly, “I’m going to hold you personally responsible for getting discipline and order in this division. I’m going to hold you personally responsible…I won’t stand for this. It’s a disgrace!”
Reddening with shame and rage, MacArthur barked back, “Yes sir!” and flung out his hand in salute. Pershing turned and stomped away.
MacArthur’s aide Major Wolf had witnessed the entire incident. He turned to MacArthur, and saw that his face, which had been beet red, was now drained of blood to a deathly white.
Without a word MacArthur walked down the loading ramp, with Wolf following. He walked into the town past the lines of wagons and caissons and clusters of men who had just marched sixty kilometers in the mud to the railroad station. He automatically returned salutes but said nothing until he found a bench and sat down.
Wolf tried to explain that this was only Pershing’s way, the kind of brutal discipline he like to mete out even to officers who were his favorites or on his staff. MacArthur would have none of it. There had to be a reason, MacArthur insisted, that Pershing had singled him out and humiliated him in this way in front of his own men.
The only thing he could come up with was his father, he told Wolf. It must have to do with some ancient resentment toward his father, who had commanded Pershing during their military mission to Japan—some never-forgotten injury by the father that Black Jack was now visiting on the son.31
Yet just five days after Pershing’s visit an envelope arrived from Chaumont. It was MacArthur’s promotion to brigadier general, signed by Pershing himself.
The news came to Pinky like a burst of sunshine. She read the news about her son’s promotion, along with forty-three other officers, in the newspapers. On June 29 she wrote a short note of effusive thanks to Pershing. “I am sending in return, a heart full, pressed down, and overflowing with grateful thanks and appreciation….You will not find our Boy wanting!”32
That was June 29. More than two weeks earlier, on June 12, she had written a much longer letter to Pershing, urging him to consider her son for promotion to brigadier general—precisely the step he had just taken. “My hope and ambition in life is to live long enough to see this son made a General Officer,” she had written in closing, “and I feel I am placing my entire life, in your hands.”33 What with passing through the hands of wartime censors and transatlantic mail delivery, it’s highly unlikely that Pershing saw the letter in time for it to influence his decision. In fact, it was not Pershing at all, but Peyton March, the chief of staff, who had attached MacArthur’s name to th
e recommendation list (possibly at Newton Baker’s urging—we’ll never know) after crossing out five names Pershing had put forward. Pershing had acquiesced, but was still seething over March’s interference. Indeed, later he tried to have the chief of staff fired.34
All the same, Pershing telegraphed a nice note back to the wife of his former commanding officer, congratulating her on her son’s promotion. It must have been doubly gratifying for Pinky, thinking that she had somehow had a hand in securing MacArthur’s position as the youngest brigadier general in the United States Army.
As for MacArthur, it took almost a week for him to finally acknowledge the promotion to Pershing.
The warm admiration and affection that both my Father and Mother have always expressed, and their confidence in the greatness of your future, have only served to make my own service in your command during the fruition of their prediction the more agreeable. May you go on and up to the mighty destiny a grateful country owes you.
It would, however, take a long time for the scars from the blows at Charmes to heal—and the bond of trust between the two men would never be fully restored.
On July 2 the Forty-second moved into Champagne, to take up its final position beside the French Fourth Army. Given the name, the Rainbows had half expected to find a verdant land of grape leaves and tangled vines where “the bottles grew on trees,” as Father Duffy put it, “and the thirsty traveler had but to detach the wire that held them.”
Instead they found a landscape that reminded them more of Nebraska, or even Texas: “A broad expanse of flat brookless country with patches of scrimpy trees that surely must be mesquite.”35 The Fourth Army’s commander was a battle-scarred French army legend named Henri Gouraud who was convinced that the Germans were coming, and coming soon—even while Pershing’s staff at Chaumont confidently believed the Germans didn’t have the strength for another major offensive.
In fact, while Douglas MacArthur was getting news of his promotion to brigadier general, the German high command had been doing the numbers, and making some decisions.
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