So Menoher relented, and after a brief respite in reserve under its new commander, the Forty-second joined the rest of the AEF on November 4 in the headlong pursuit of their next goal: the city of Sedan.
Sedan was the critical main juncture for the German army in France, and less than a week before the Armistice, German resistance was steadily crumbling. American units were advancing so fast they found it difficult to keep themselves supplied, as their supply wagons got bogged down in muddy roads and almost incessant rain. They passed long lines of German prisoners who had finally had enough and had thrown down their weapons at the first sight of an American doughboy.
November 5 found the Forty-second just twelve miles south of Sedan. The operation had become a mad chase, as Elmer Sherwood put it, to get to Sedan before anyone else did. “The phrase ‘take Sedan’ became a sort of fetish,” First Army commander Liggett confessed, and “acted as a spur and jaded spirits were stimulated as if dope had been administered.” No one, certainly, needed the energizing jolt more than the worn-out men of the Forty-second.57
That was when Pershing’s HQ made a crucial, potentially fatal mistake.
A memorandum was read that afternoon over the telephone to corps commanders, stating: “General Pershing desires that the honor of entering Sedan should fall to the American First Army.” As such he urged continuing the advance through the night. And then, added at the last minute at the bottom of the memorandum were the words “Boundaries will not be considered.”
Pershing later stated that he had meant the boundary between the American First and French Fourth Armies, which was also engaged in the frantic rush for Sedan. But the message did not state that: instead it suggested that the boundaries between the various advancing American divisions be disregarded, which meant that troops from two entire corps, division after division, would now be piling into one another along each road and hedgerow leading into Sedan. Pershing’s message, as MacArthur put it, “precipitated what narrowly missed being one of the great tragedies of American history.”58
And the message’s author, as it happened, was none other than George C. Marshall.
The confusion the message set off became apparent on the night of November 6, as General Reilly’s Eighty-third Brigade, advancing along the road to Sedan, suddenly ran into troops from the First Division, which had been stationed far to the left of I Corps but began cutting clear across the Corps’ line of advance—25,000 men in seven separate columns—following their commander’s orders “to march immediately on Sedan.”59
The chaos in the darkness was appalling, and dangerous—the men of the Big Red One were squarely in the Eighty-third’s line of fire. By dawn, news of the mess had reached MacArthur. He was preparing to set out from his headquarters at Bulson when he was told an officer from the First Division was waiting for him outside.
“I was very much astonished to hear this,” as he described it later. He went out to find it was an officer he knew, Colonel Ericsson of the Sixteenth Infantry.
“What are you doing here, Ericsson?” MacArthur asked.
“Here are my orders,” the colonel answered, handing MacArthur a copy of Marshall’s memo. MacArthur glanced at it, and said, “Where are your men?”
Ericsson told him they were coming up the river road while others were headed along the Maisoncelle-Bulson road.
“Withdraw your men at once,” MacArthur snapped. “This movement is very dangerous and might be disastrous.”60
Ericsson said he couldn’t, it was too late, and he didn’t even know where his commanding officer, General Parker, was. It was an angry and exasperated MacArthur who then set out from Bulson to sort out the confusion, after sending messages to his commanders warning them of what was happening and to avoid Americans firing on one another. He was determined to get to the head of his brigade “in order to prevent personally any of these occurrences,” he wrote, and was crossing a series of fields near Beau-Menil Farm northeast of Bulson when he suddenly found himself staring down the barrel of a very large service pistol—while he and his aide Major Wolf were ringed by nervous men pointing rifles at the pair.
To his relief they were not Germans but Americans—men of the First Division’s Sixteenth Infantry on patrol who had blundered into his sector. But the patrol and the lieutenant in charge, Lieutenant Black, refused to lower their weapons. They had never seen an outfit like MacArthur’s before: the rumpled cap, the gray sweater with no insignia, the flowing scarf, and riding crop. As far as they were concerned, they had captured a German officer, maybe even a general.
Black cocked his pistol and ordered MacArthur and Wolf to march down the road.
MacArthur sized up the tired, trigger-happy bunch and speaking softly but urgently, convinced them who he actually was. Black apologized and tucked away his revolver; MacArthur explained what was happening—a midfield collision between two infantry divisions—and told Black he needed to go back to his commanding officer, Colonel Harrell (as it happened, MacArthur’s classmate from West Point), and get him to pull his men back.
To show there were no hard feelings, MacArthur offered one of the soldiers in the patrol a cigarette, a Camel. The man took a grateful drag and then said, “I was thinking, if you had just been a Boche general instead of an American one we would all of us got the D.S.C.”
MacArthur had to laugh. “If you don’t get a medal in any event you do get a package of cigarettes,” and passed him the pack of Camels.
The soldier thanked him, and said wistfully, “To tell the truth, sir, I would rather have the cigarettes than the medal.”
Black and his men then set off, the soldier holding rear point. As the patrol descended the hill, the soldier turned back to MacArthur and lifted his rifle in salute. “I raised my cap to him,” MacArthur recalled, “as he disappeared in the morning mist.”
Later MacArthur learned the soldier had been killed in the fighting around Sedan.61
—
In the early evening of November 10, MacArthur was standing on a rise of ground overlooking the city that the American First Army had almost come to blows to reach. Ironically, it was the French, not the Americans, who finally liberated Sedan. But MacArthur knew that while the French might have the town, the Americans had the more valuable real estate, a series of heights facing the Meuse River with commanding views on all sides. In front of him were hundreds of freight cars that the Germans had hoped to use to support their troops, but that now were sitting waiting for grateful and hungry French and American soldiers.62
That afternoon he had gotten some more good news. Following General Menoher’s recommendation, he had been given command of the entire Forty-second Division, replacing General Rhodes, who had been in charge for less than twenty-four hours. For MacArthur, it was the climax of what had been a spectacular war. He had begun it as a young upstart; he was ending it as an army legend.
That was the other good news. For two days there had been rumors about an armistice ending the fighting, to start at 11:00 A.M. on the 11th. MacArthur was able to pause and reflect on all that had happened in the last year since his arrival in France, and what his division (and now it was his division) had accomplished—but also what it had cost.
He summed it up in a bulletin that went out to headquarters a week later:
“The 42nd Division has now been in France more than a year….Out of the 224 days since it first entered the line the division has been engaged with the enemy 180 days…The Division has marched by road, by camion and moved by train; it was the only American Division to assist in the decisive defeat of the great German offensive of July 15th…From that time on it has taken part in every large American operation.”63
Although the Forty-second was created from scratch using National Guard troops, even the Germans rated it among the Americans’ top two or three divisions. A later study showed that in terms of ground taken in combat, prisoners captured, decorations awarded, and days in combat, the Rainbow counted as the second most effective div
ision in Pershing’s army. Only the Second, made up of half regulars and half marines, did better.64
But it had cost almost 14,000 casualties: 2,644 battle deaths and 11,275 wounded.65 MacArthur had risked being among them many times, but somehow emerged unscathed. Soldiers had a nickname to describe him: “Bullet Proof.” As MacArthur made clear to others, he believed it was a sign of his destiny, even God’s guidance. It had carried him through safely and made him major general at thirty-eight. But would that destiny now carry him forward in peace as it did during war?
—
Meanwhile, far away in the blue waters of the Pacific, warships were on the move.
They were Japanese warships, part of the navy the island nation had been building over the last decade. Just as Douglas’s father had predicted, imperial Japan was the rising new power in Asia, and the war MacArthur and the Rainbow had just fought had completed the modernization and industrialization started there three decades earlier.
In 1914 when the war started, Japan had only eight major steel plants. When it was over, it had fourteen, as well as 166 smaller facilities rolling out steel for Japan’s growing navy and army as well as a growing civilian economy. Japan’s copper industry grew by almost half, while electric power generation had shot up by 34 percent.66
Unlike from the European powers, the war had demanded no great sacrifice from Japan. Just the opposite, in fact. Simply by joining the Allies in 1915 Japan had doubled the size and reach of its Asian empire at almost no cost. First it took over China’s Shantung Peninsula from the Germans virtually without a shot. Together with the iron- and coal-rich portions of Manchuria taken in the Russo-Japanese War and the peninsula of Korea annexed in 1910, Japan now had a large and resource-abundant empire on the Asian mainland, as well as a stranglehold on an increasingly feeble China.
Then, gliding like lean, silent greyhounds into the central Pacific, the Japanese navy’s vessels seized one chain of islands after another from the retreating Germans: the Marshalls, the Marianas, the Carolines, and the Gilberts. In three decades those names would be engraved forever on American memories. But for now they served as forward bases for Japan’s naval presence, extending it to easy striking distance of American bases in Guam and the Philippines, and the horseshoe-shaped port known as Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
That was just as important. The navy had also looked at the islands off the coast of New Guinea in the Bismarck Sea, the Solomons, and New Britain, for possible bases. But those islands, like New Guinea itself, had passed to Australia in the final peace settlement. No matter, Japanese admirals told themselves. After the humiliation of America negotiating the peace that ended the war with Russia, and despite Teddy Roosevelt’s attempts to smooth relations afterward, including ceding control of the Korean peninsula to Japan from 1907 on, wrote Admiral Fukudomi, “the Imperial navy made the United States its sole strategic enemy.”67
Arthur MacArthur had been right. The emergence of Japan was becoming the key “problem of the Pacific,” and “the grim, taciturn, aloof men of iron character and unshakable purpose” that Douglas had so admired on his visit were already preparing the tools to thrust a dagger at America—a dagger whose first target would be the Philippines.
CHAPTER 8
BACK TO WEST POINT
Should serve some years in present grade before promotion to next higher. Has exalted opinion of himself.
—GENERAL PERSHING ON BRIGADIER GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR, 1922
As the fighting ended, Mac’s reputation stood on a national pedestal.
Secretary of War Newton Baker pronounced him “the greatest American field commander produced by the war.” General Gouraud, his old colleague from the desperate Second Battle of the Marne in July 1918, chimed in: “I consider General MacArthur to be one of the finest and bravest soldiers I have ever served with.” And Menoher, his old commander, summed up his feelings in a final efficiency report dated August 28, 1919: “One of the most efficient, energetic, and talented officers I have ever known, I consider him an officer of most brilliant attainments.”1
On March 16, Pershing himself presented MacArthur with his consolation prize for not winning the Medal of Honor: a Distinguished Service Medal to set beside his Distinguished Service Crosses. George Patton and Bill Donovan, who did win a Medal of Honor, were the only other soldiers to be awarded both. And from his fellow officers of the Forty-second he received a gold cigarette case, emblazoned “Bravest of the Brave,” which he carried with him the rest of his life.
But what would America’s greatest field commander do now that war was done?
At first there was no time to ponder the question. By the terms of the Armistice, the Americans were to take over an occupation zone inside Germany itself. The Forty-second found itself assigned to the area around the city of Coblenz, and MacArthur took as his headquarters a magnificent castle at Sinzig that overlooked the gently flowing waters of the Rhine.
Most Rainbow soldiers, by contrast, were billeted in German homes. Even though Coblenz, like most postwar German cities, was teetering on the edge of starvation, for the survivors of the Ourcq and Côte de Châtillon it seemed like an exotic paradise. No more dawn stand-tos; no more night raids, eyes straining to see through the dark and a throat dry with terror; no more seeing friends torn apart by a hail of machine-gun fire or coughing their lungs out from a phosgene gas attack; no more catching a few hours of sleep in a vermin-ridden foxhole. The Forty-second found occupation duty anything but arduous, and the locals were equally relieved to see the end to the killing. As MacArthur wrote in his memoirs, “The warm hospitality of the population, their well-ordered way of life, their thrift and geniality forged a feeling of mutual respect and esteem.”2
But for MacArthur the start of occupation also brought disappointment. Two weeks after the Armistice he had to hand over the Rainbow to Major General Charles Flagler. Pershing bluntly told him the reason: his promotion to major general had been blocked. Peyton March had put a freeze on all promotions the day after the Armistice, and that included MacArthur’s. Without that second star, he could not retain command of the Forty-second.
Pershing, judging by his later comments, was not heartbroken about conveying the news. For MacArthur, it must have been a bitter moment handing over the division he had created, and in his mind carried almost single-handedly to victory, even if it meant returning to his old comrades in the Eighty-fourth.
The disappointment was compounded by the breakdown of his health. The constant gassing at the front led to a severe throat infection, followed by an attack of the so-called Spanish flu that was knocking down and even killing millions across Europe that winter. (Back in the States, one of those laid prostrate by the same flu was MacArthur’s new friend, Franklin Roosevelt.) The twin illnesses left him prostrate in bed for weeks. Then in February came a bout of diphtheria. The symptoms were real enough; fortunately, he wrote later, “the doctors pulled me through.” But MacArthur hadn’t been immune from psychosomatic-related bouts like this in the past. Perhaps part of his erratic health problems was an underlying uncertainty, now that the fighting was done and the rules and red tape of the ordinary army reasserted themselves, about what the future held for him.3
Still, as he recovered he had plenty of visitors to distract him. Some came to see the American occupation at work, but most in order to see him, the glamorous Fighting Dude celebrated in newspapers and army reports. MacArthur had learned something important during the war, besides how to command troops in battle. He had learned the value of a self-fashioned persona for standing out from his fellow officers whose personalities, for the most part, tended to be indistinguishable from their drab khaki uniforms. But MacArthur’s persona was not a staged pose, or simple playacting: He had proved his courage and skill in battle a dozen times. But his careful self-fashioning did reflect his growing awareness that a characteristic style of dress with accoutrements like a riding crop and a silk scarf—or later his Ray-Ban sunglasses and his enormous cornc
ob pipe—could not only help to rally his men’s morale and focus their attention, but could also catch and focus the media’s attention on someone whose destiny, as he believed and they would soon realize, was to rise to the top.
One who certainly noticed was Joseph Chase, a portrait artist traveling around the country doing preparatory sketches of American commanders from the war.4 Chase was intrigued to meet the man whom both French and American colleagues branded the bravest of the brave, and he was not disappointed.
“Young MacArthur looks like the typical hero of historical romance; he could easily have stepped out of the pages of The Prisoner of Zenda,” he wrote. (Living in a castle once owned by Charlemagne didn’t hurt that romantic image, either.) MacArthur agreed to pose for a portrait by candlelight, and Chase had a chance to examine him more closely.
“He is lean, light-skinned, with long, well-kept fingers and is always carefully groomed…He is a thorough-going brainy young man, distinctly of the city type, a good talker and a good listener…He is quick in his movements, physical and mental, and is subject to changing moods; he knits his brows or laughs heartily with equal facility, and often during the same sentence.”5
Another who fell under the MacArthur spell was Kansas newspaperman William Allen White. He was there touring the American occupation zone, and his lunch with General MacArthur came almost as a revelation.
“I had never met before so vivid, so captivating, so magnetic a man,” White enthused. “He was all that Barrymore and John Drew hoped to be. And how he could talk!” MacArthur was casually lounging in a ragged brown sweater and civilian pants—“nothing more”—as they talked for two hours about the war, the occupation, and MacArthur’s anger at the general order forbidding fraternization between American soldiers and German civilians, especially women. “The order only hurt the boys,” he told White. He told how the boys of the Forty-second had organized a Christmas party in one of the little towns around Coblenz, complete with Christmas tree, and then had to have a stag dance because no German women were allowed.
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