Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  All the same, he was rarely alone with her. The MacArthur entourage, she learned, was like “one big family.” Jimmy Ord or Major Eisenhower would be sitting attentively at her elbow along with Tommy Davis, while Mary MacArthur chatted away amiably. Eisenhower, meanwhile, had the cabin next to hers. In the mornings she could hear him singing the Irving Berlin song “You’re in the Army now, you’re not behind a plow,” as he shaved.5

  There was only one person missing from the charming gathering: Mrs. MacArthur. Pinky remained ensconced in her room, growing increasingly ill. MacArthur would stop by every night—as he had every night they were together for half a century—to give an account of the day’s doings. He never mentioned Jean, but his sister-in-law Mary noticed and approved.

  In fact, as they neared Shanghai it was Mary who suggested that Jean cut short her visit there and sail on with them to Manila. Jean was delighted to accept.6 They docked in Manila on October 26. MacArthur, dressed in a white suit with straw boater, was greeted with open arms and a formal ceremony by the soon-to-be-president Quezon and his entourage. The MacArthur entourage had arrived in time to attend his inauguration on November 15; almost a quarter of a million people jammed the streets of Manila to watch the proceedings and the parade afterward. Douglas invited Jean to attend the inauguration as well, and the party afterward at the Wallace Field Auditorium, where couples whirled around the dance floor until the early morning hours while she and the general talked quietly in the moonlight.

  Douglas MacArthur was clearly taken by the vivacious young woman from Murfreesboro. But his principal concern in those early days in Manila was his mother’s health. Mother and son had moved into the six-room air-conditioned penthouse of the Manila Hotel—his home for the next six years. Two large balconies gave a commanding view of the red-roofed city and Manila Bay. One, which became MacArthur’s favorite spot for pacing and thinking, opened out from the dining room and had an excellent view of Bataan and Corregidor.7

  Pinky moved into one of the bedrooms, with Dr. Hutter close by in another suite of rooms in the hotel. Hutter had okayed the voyage to the Philippines because he had known it would probably not worsen her condition, although it would never make it better. She was fading fast, and it seemed she would never leave the penthouse again.

  Now that she was settled in her bedroom and the penthouse, MacArthur could focus on the job at hand.

  —

  It was a difficult, some said impossible, one. But with his usual optimism he had reason to be hopeful. He had a highly competent staff, a comfortable income, and would soon be taking on an impressive new title: Field Marshal of the Philippine Army. He also had the complete trust of the new president, and virtual carte blanche to design whatever plan he wished for creating a national Philippine army. Existing Filipino units like the Philippine Scouts would continue to be part of the U.S. forces in the Philippines, and outside his command. Otherwise it was up to him to figure out how to arm and defend these thousand or so separate islands, while working from a blank canvas—and with no established budget.

  Fortunately, he had in his hands a defense plan outline by Siguion Reyna of the Philippine Department of the Interior. Dated May 1935, it started with what seemed a dismal premise: that the Philippines was more geographically vulnerable to attack by its more powerful neighbors than Switzerland or Belgium, which the Germans had steamrolled in 1914 and were about to take over again in 1940. Raising and maintaining a modern army large enough to repel such an attack, Reyna had concluded, required a much larger economic base than the islands could boast, while a modern navy large enough to prevent it was similarly out of the question.8

  Therefore, the report recommended building an effective defense system that would have to rely on a three-tier system of mobilizing manpower.

  The first would be a regular professional army nucleus, the second a corps of active reserves, and the third a national militia trained for regular military service if and when the need arose. This would also raise the country’s level of civic culture by bringing discipline and a sense of pride to thousands of young male Filipinos.

  MacArthur must have smiled as he read Reyna’s report. It was almost exactly the same idea that he had outlined to Manuel Quezon when they met in 1934 (something Reyna noted and that made Quezon more willing to accept the three-tier plan) and had hammered out with his staff while they were still in the United States.

  MacArthur, Ord, and Ike had worked out the preliminary numbers with help from the Staff College. They would propose a professional force of 930 officers and 10,000 other ranks as the first-tier core. Then each year 40,000 recruits would be trained as reservists, to be responsible for military service for thirty years. Half of those would enter special camps for five and a half months’ training each year, followed by the other half.9 To supplement this force would be a national militia organized according to a decentralized command structure, which seemed the best way to ensure that the Philippines’ far-flung islands could respond quickly to any attack.

  MacArthur insisted the entire plan had to be revised to cost no more than 16 million pesos—roughly the amount he could expect the National Assembly to give him from its own limited budget. So Ike and Ord cut the projected professional force from 1,500 officers and 19,000 enlisted men to 930 officers and 7,000 men, put off building an independent artillery corps, and deferred the purchase plan for modern munitions from ten years to two decades. They warned him that they felt the revised plan lacked enough professional personnel to be truly effective. There was also the problem that for the next ten years the Philippine Army would be equipped with essentially World War One–era weapons.

  According to Ike, MacArthur waved their concerns away. Douglas MacArthur was here; he had made miracles happen in the States with a deeply straitened budget. He could at least do the same here in the Philippines.10

  There was, however, a strange incident during Quezon’s inauguration that foretold some of the difficulties to come.

  The question had arisen of how large a gun salute President Quezon was entitled to receive at state occasions. The standard number was, of course, twenty-one; but the head of the Bureau of Insular Affairs recommended that the number of the gun salute not exceed “that accorded the sovereign head of government,” namely President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Cox suggested nineteen guns, the same number as the governors of American states and the outgoing Philippine governor-general.11

  This set MacArthur off on a tirade. “I disagree utterly,” he said. To refuse the full twenty-one-gun “sovereign salute to the elective head of this people will create a sense of resentment and insult in the breasts of all Filipinos.” He pointed out that the Filipino government would undoubtedly prescribe the twenty-one-gun salute in its official protocol. This would lead to the strange situation in which U.S. forces in the Philippines would be giving nineteen-gun salutes, and the Philippine army and navy, and other foreign navies, a twenty-one-gun salute, to the same person. “I know of nothing which is more calculated to create friction than such a situation.”12

  The bureau chief was convinced, and forwarded the recommendation to the secretary of war. But when MacArthur’s former ally Secretary Dern showed up in Manila for the inauguration, he learned that the ruling had caused rancor among American officials, particularly the new high commissioner, Frank Murphy, who felt the gesture would undermine their authority and “make effective exercise of American sovereignty impracticable.”13

  At this point President Roosevelt weighed in. After “long consideration” he had decided Quezon should get a only nineteen-gun salute, reserving the twenty-one-gun honor for the president of the United States, who “should be accorded special honor because of his direct supervision and control over foreign affairs.”

  The inauguration was only days away when someone informed Quezon of Roosevelt’s decision. He flew into a rage and said he would no longer take part in the inauguration ceremony. It took some work by MacArthur along with soothing words from Dern and
a reassuring telegram from Roosevelt himself to finally calm him down. Angrily he acquiesced in the decision; so did MacArthur, although he was shortly to learn that the army’s adjutant general had ruled that American forces in the Philippines would accord no salutes or honors to his position as field marshal, since the Philippine Army “is considered analogous to the National Guard” rather than to the armed forces of a sovereign nation.14

  It was galling, even maddening. But if MacArthur was paying attention, it was also an indication of just where MacArthur and the Philippines stood in the minds of his former colleagues and the administration.

  They were nowhere.

  —

  In the meantime, his mother died.

  It wasn’t her heart but a cerebral thrombosis, or blood clot in the arteries of the brain, that finally took her life. Dr. Hutter and MacArthur watched her slowly sink, until finally she fell into a coma. On the morning of December 3 she rallied enough to say some soothing words to her son. Then she was gone.

  She had been the central character in his life, even before his father’s death, certainly much more so than his wife, Louise—whom Pinky had increasingly come to despise. She had been tough and charming, practical yet sentimental, an incurable romantic yet wise to the ways of the world—character traits that she had passed on to her son.

  Although Mac had watched her strength wither over several years, it was still devastating. “Our devoted comradeship of so many years came to an end,” he later wrote in his memoirs.15 To his friend Charlie O’Laughlin, he wrote days after her death, “Mother’s death has been a tremendous blow to me and I am finding the greatest difficulty in recoordinating myself to the changed conditions [of her absence]…My loss has partially stunned me and I find myself groping desperately but futilely…For the first [time] in my life, I need all the help I can get.”16

  For fifty-five years, Pinky had been both his guide and his anchor. Although MacArthur had long since developed a rational confidence in his own judgment and powers, his mother had always supplied the emotional reassurance that had enabled him to make key decisions and take sometimes unorthodox risks. Where could he turn now?

  For now, MacArthur was plunged into mourning. He ordered her suite locked and left untouched for a year, while he lived in virtual seclusion, attending no social events. Pinky’s death “affected the General’s spirit for many months,” Ike noted in his diary.17 He did have one thing to distract him, however. And he now threw himself into the project with the desperate focus of a heartbroken man.

  It was the first piece of legislation President Quezon presented to his National Assembly, and—given the events over the next five years—by far the most important.

  The plan proposed that all Filipino boys undergo “preparatory military training” in school starting at age ten and continuing until they turned seventeen and passed into “the junior reserve.” Even girls would be required to train for “auxiliary service” in the event of war, while they were in school.

  Then at age twenty, the men would register for five and a half months of active duty in the Philippine Army, after which they passed into a series of reserve readiness programs until they turned fifty. The bill requested $8 million for the first year, including construction of 125 training camps scattered throughout the islands (Ike and Ord were in charge of that project); a military academy patterned after West Point; and a Reserve Officers’ Training School at Baguio, under the direction of the newest addition to MacArthur’s staff, Captain Bonner Fellers.18

  No sooner was the plan made public than the criticisms and recriminations began, especially on the other side of the Pacific. Planners at the War Department and the new chief of staff’s office deemed the plan impracticable from the start. They pointed out that unlike MacArthur’s model of Switzerland, the Philippines was an archipelago of islands, not a compact landmass, and that an invader’s navy would be free to blockade and control communication between the different elements in the defensive cordon. Instead of gaining a defender’s usual advantage of secure interior lines, MacArthur’s army, scattered across a series of unconnected islands, would have the opposite problem.

  They doubted that such a widely dispersed force could ever protect the Philippines from an attacker like Japan unless it had substantial help from the United States. And “if the United States does not intend to assume responsibility for the defense of the new Philippine State, it should announce that fact at an early date,” the planners said. That way there would be time for the Filipinos to abandon MacArthur’s quixotic plan and come up with an alternate strategy, including (although Washington did not say so) declaring Philippine neutrality in the event of war.19

  MacArthur had dismissed these concerns as he had Ike and Ord’s about the army’s internal organization. When the time comes to fight, the Filipinos will fight no matter what, was the way he would have put it; he had faith that their desire for independence and freedom would enable them to overcome any obstacle. He was also convinced that the United States would not abandon them. A declaration of neutrality would entail immediate American evacuation of the Philippines—something that MacArthur thought impractical as well as inconceivable. Instead, he believed that President Roosevelt and the War Department would take whatever steps were necessary to arm and equip the Filipinos as America’s first line of defense against a rising Japanese empire.

  What his father had foreseen—Japan’s rise to power as “the problem of the Pacific”—was finally coming to pass.20 As chief of staff, he had been worried about growing Japanese presence in the Philippines, centering on the city of Davao, where Japanese businesses and workshops had opened and flourished. By 1934, 18,000 Japanese were living and working there, while Japan had replaced the United States as the chief supplier of cotton goods to the Philippines. Japanese-Filipino economic ties couldn’t have been friendlier.21 But MacArthur had in his hands staff reports warning that those Japanese businessmen and visitors included spies and espionage agents. Maybe Quezon couldn’t believe that the busy productive Davao colony could turn into a dangerous fifth column in the event of war. But MacArthur sensed that the Japanese leadership, with its “iron character and unshakeable purpose,” and boldness and courage, would soon pose a threat to the peace and security of the entire region, and that the Philippines would be the crucial flash point if U.S. and Japanese interests collided.

  This was already happening, over China. American public opinion’s disgust with Japan’s imperial depredations there was beginning to affect U.S. policy. By 1936 the machine tool and oil embargoes that would catapult the two countries into war were only three years away. If a U.S. pullout from the Philippines was unthinkable, a situation where the islands would be the principal battleground between Japan and the United States was not.

  MacArthur knew that in the event of war the Philippine Army would have to depend heavily on the United States for supplies and equipment, as well as naval support. He had said as much to the new commissioner, Frank Murphy.22 He was already planning to ask for surplus arms and equipment to be sent over; he had full faith that Washington would be forthcoming in this and in everything else he needed. And there is no doubt that he communicated that faith repeatedly to President Quezon, then and later.

  After considerable public hubbub, the National Assembly dutifully did as MacArthur and Quezon requested, and passed the defense plan in July 1936. Quezon hoped it would give the Philippines an army like the one he had seen when he visited Chiang Kai-shek in Canton. “My goodness, every soldier looked at you with stern eyes,” he would say. “Every time I mentioned Chiang Kai-Shek they automatically stood at attention.”23 MacArthur still foresaw something more akin to the Swiss system. But unlike the Swiss, the Philippines had no military tradition. It was hard to impose discipline when trainees regularly went on strike and disgruntled garrisons in faraway posts sometimes turned to banditry or ran amok.

  Yet MacArthur still believed his plan would work, given enough time, money, and support from
the United States. He had unshakable faith both in the Philippine people and in his grand strategic vision for the United States in the Pacific.

  It was a vision, however, that was not shared in Washington.

  —

  Planners there had to face a different reality. There had been too many cuts over too many years in both the army and the navy to allow for a force to defend the Philippines, even by the pitiful standards of War Plan Orange.

  That plan formulated in 1923, of course, had entrusted the defense of Manila to its American garrison for six months until naval resources could be rushed out to help. The navy certainly understood the strategic importance of the islands, and wanted to keep its options open, but it had no resources to do so. It would have its hands full just trying to maintain a defense perimeter running from Alaska and Hawaii to the Panama Canal. The army’s preferred solution was simply a complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces by 1946.24 One planner wrote, “To carry out the present Orange plan…would be literally an act of madness.”

  The politicians, by contrast—including Roosevelt—were pledged not to abandon the Philippines in the event of war. They also refused to provide the resources to defend it. It was a classic mismatch of objectives to means, with Douglas MacArthur and his new Philippine army caught in the middle.

  His ambitious national defense plan had already given Roosevelt and his advisors a fit of worry; even Henry Stimson, hardly a foe of defending the Philippines, advised against it. Stimson told Quezon during his visit in March 1935 that “the American garrison and any garrison he could raise would be merely a pawn to fall into the hands of the Japanese,” and force the U.S. Navy into a battle it might very well lose.25 Some in the State Department even worried that creating a modern Philippine army would provoke the Japanese and precipitate the war everyone wanted to avoid.