Douglas MacArthur Read online

  But Wood’s biggest headache was the strategic plans being drawn up in Washington, and their implications for the islands. Wood’s concerns were shared by Major General William Wright, departmental commander, and then his successor, who arrived shortly after Douglas did, General George Read, with whom MacArthur had served at Leavenworth. The story they told was a woeful one. The Philippine Department was seriously short of men and equipment for the mission it had, especially since planners at the War Department presented them with War Plan Orange.

  It dealt with a hypothetical attack on the Philippines by Japan. Washington planners estimated it would be at least six months before any help could arrive from the States. War Plan Orange decreed that in those circumstances, the Philippine Department garrison was to join with native forces to hold Corregidor and Bataan in order to keep the Japanese from using Manila Harbor until help finally arrived—if indeed it ever did.

  But how were they supposed to do this, Wright asked, with only 4,100 American soldiers? There were no resources for new, modern fortifications, while the funds needed to maintain, let alone increase the troops there continued to be cut.

  Wright and Read could only throw up their hands in frustration. Whenever their protests reached Washington, they were simply told, “The Philippine Department must carry on under the status quo until the time arrives for the establishment of a stable and continuing policy.”10

  Unfortunately, no one could say when that time would be. Indeed, it never came. And neither Wood nor Wright nor Read nor MacArthur himself could know that MacArthur would be the one who would pay the terrible price for a plan for defending the Philippines with American arms that was inadequate from the start.

  —

  So America would remain in charge of the Philippines for the foreseeable future, all the while refusing to devote the resources needed to protect the islands or guarantee their security—the very reason the United States claimed it was needed there in the first place. The alternative, cutting losses and abandoning the Philippines to its fate, was not an option. The army’s chief planner baldly stated, “Our withdrawal would be encouragement to the pan-Asiatic movement…and [leave] our friends of the European nations to bear the white man’s burden alone.” For the sake of racial superiority, if no other reason, it was important for the Americans to stay.11

  MacArthur himself had little truck with this kind of thinking. His father had inoculated him against race-based white supremacist arguments; he saw no reason why policymakers in Washington resisted Quezon’s call for independence. Then and later, he was convinced that a free and independent Philippines would make a steadfast ally in holding the islands against an armed aggressor—and protecting America’s western Pacific flank. But racist “attitudes die hard,” he noted years later, “and the old idea of colonial exploitation still had its vigorous supporters,” as did those who believed Filipinos were simply incapable of self-rule.12 It would be another decade and more before MacArthur would have a chance to change American minds on that point.

  For now, as brigadier general, he was supposed to head the Military District of Manila, a post created specifically for him. But he had barely five hundred men under his command, and by mid-morning his in tray was largely empty.

  So he took to returning home for lunch, to the opulent comfort of 1 Calle Victoria, once the headquarters of the Philippine Constabulary and perched high in the Intramuros. Louise had decorated the villa with ultrachic furnishings while painting the walls jet-black. With virtually unlimited funds at her disposal, she had matching blue naval uniforms made for all the servants, with the letters “MacA” stitched on the breast pocket.

  MacArthur taught her son Walter riding, and bought them all a small beach house so they could get away from the summer heat of Manila. Otherwise, it was a life of appalling boredom, especially for Louise. For the woman who had once been the toast of Paris café society, Manila society seemed unfathomably provincial. Their one frequent dinner guest was General Wood, and as the courses came and went she would complain bitterly about MacArthur’s exile. Wood would nod and agree, but point out that there was nothing he could do about it.13

  To relieve her boredom, Louise volunteered to work as a part-time police officer; she even made at least one arrest. So it must have been with some sense of relief for Louise but trepidation for her husband when a telegram arrived from Arthur’s wife, Mary, saying that MacArthur’s mother was desperately ill. MacArthur announced they were leaving for the States at once.

  They returned to America in March 1923 to find Pinky’s heart condition worse than ever. Her son Douglas was not overly worried. He had been through this before when he was superintendent and his mother had checked into the post hospital. Doctors then had told him with solemn faces that his mother had days, possibly weeks, to live. He had gone to her bedside, patted her hand, and told her, “I have the finest news in the world. The doctor just told me that you have a strong heart, and you can leave the hospital anytime you want.” She checked out in less than a week.14

  Mary MacArthur’s real problem wasn’t her heart, but the fact that she was lonely and missed her devoted son. So he found a new army doctor, Howard Hutter, who understood the problem and would be at her side for the rest of her life, even during MacArthur’s frequent absences. But while Pinky’s physical powers were certainly fading, she remained as sharp and relentless as ever in her quest for her son’s future. She even recovered enough to have a meeting with her old friend the army chief of staff, General John Pershing, followed by a long, flirtatious letter.

  “It was a real joy to see you on Saturday looking still so young and wonderfully handsome!” it read. “I think you will never grow old.” The main purpose of the letter was to urge him to reconsider her son’s career. “Can’t you find it convenient to give him his promotion during your regime as Chief of Staff?”15 But the letter brought only silence from Pershing and no relief for MacArthur. He returned to the Philippines with his prospects as frozen as ever.

  There was, however, one glimmer on the horizon. In June, MacArthur was given command of a brigade of the brand-new Philippine Division, based at Fort William McKinley. Created in April 1922, the 7,000-man division was the brainchild of Brigadier General Omar Bundy, whom MacArthur had known during his AEF days. It was an effort, admittedly on a shoestring, to make up for the shortfall of American troops by integrating Filipino troops into a divisional organization under American command. These were the Forty-fifth and Fifty-seventh regiments of the Philippine Scouts, the elite corps of Filipino volunteers created during the 1900 insurrection.

  For MacArthur, the post meant a welcome return to the routine of commanding an infantry unit, even during peacetime. He also discovered to his delight that the tough, able Scouts generally outperformed their American counterparts in field exercises, especially at marksmanship.16 Among his other duties was mapping out a defensive perimeter for the Bataan Peninsula in case of attack. It meant mapping more than forty square miles of wilderness with a team of surveyors and engineers. “I covered every foot of rugged terrain, over its trails, up and down its steep mountainous slopes, and through the bamboo thickets,” he wrote. He was able to hand over the job to the department’s chief engineer the next year with relief. But he also acquired an intimate knowledge of that peninsula that came in handy in much darker and more dire circumstances some eighteen years later.17

  MacArthur developed a strong respect for the Filipinos under his command—“they were excellent troops,” he said years later, “completely professional, loyal, and devoted”—and by most indications they became devoted to him. So it must have come as a considerable shock when on a steamy morning in July 1924 his American officers burst into his office with chilling news.

  His Scouts were in mutiny.

  —

  The first indication of trouble had come the night of June 27, when Fort McKinley’s provost marshal heard a gentle but urgent knock at his door.

  It was a Filipino Scout
from the Fifty-seventh—the same regiment in which that previous year every company had scored 100 percent in its rifle and machine-gun marksmanship. “I believe this is the first regiment in the Army of the United States to make such a remarkable record,” MacArthur’s boss, General Read, had written.18 This nervous Scout informed the provost marshal that there were ongoing meetings at the barracks and in homes outside the fort, and the Scouts were seething.

  The Scouts had found out they were drawing less than half the pay of the American troops and had none of their financial benefits, like hardship pay. The disgruntled Scouts were determined to take action, and were preparing to “step out for their rights,” the man told the provost marshal. He said the other Scouts would kill him if they knew he was speaking to an American, and then he slipped back out into the night.19

  Remarkably, the provost marshal seems to have done nothing until July 6, when he broke up one such meeting at the post hospital. Perhaps he thought it was panicky gossip; or perhaps he believed it was impossible that the redoubtable Scouts could waver in their duty.

  Everyone was disabused of this hope the next day, when the bulk of two battalions refused to obey orders for drill. The disturbed officers turned to MacArthur, who quickly called the military police to quell the scene. There was no violence, no abuse of white officers or attack on the facilities. The Scouts themselves called it a “strike,” not a mutiny. But they refused to form, drill, or obey any orders. In the end, MPs rounded up 222 mutineers and marched them off to the post guardhouse. Although the mutiny spread briefly to another regiment the next day, the entire episode ended almost as suddenly as it had begun.

  All the same, the story of the mutiny caused a national sensation—and for American officers in the Philippines, it was an unwelcome wake-up call. They began to wonder what would happen if they found themselves facing an attacking enemy in front, but had an unwilling ally—or even a hostile enemy—at their rear? Contrary to the assertion of some later scholars, American authorities didn’t entirely ignore the problem. In fact, one of the steps toward reform was appointing MacArthur in Bundy’s place, especially since MacArthur was known to be a supporter of equal status of his Filipino soldiers with whites.

  Yet nothing much could be done about the core grievances, which revolved around pay—especially when the Philippine Department had a demonstrably tight budget. As for Filipinos, mutiny meant the Scouts lost their luster as an elite force. Instead, they looked like everybody else: natives deprived of equal status with their American partners. “Whereas in the past, they have applied for enlistment” in such numbers that there was a waiting list for joining the Scouts, Read had to report, “a new and difficult situation confronts this department…in which Scout soldiers will have to be recruited.”20

  Then or later, MacArthur revealed nothing about his feelings regarding the mutiny. It doesn’t merit even a mention in his memoirs. But if MacArthur had set himself the task of restoring trust, or even equalizing the pay and benefits of his Scouts, he never had enough time to try.

  On September 24, less than two months after taking over the division, he got the welcome news he had been waiting for for five years. He was being promoted to major general.

  The chief obstacle to his advancement, Pershing, had finally been forced to retire at the mandatory age of sixty-four. His successor, John L. Hines, immediately moved MacArthur to the head of the promotion list, which became effective in January 1925. MacArthur just missed being the youngest major general since the Civil War. But as his press ally, The New York Times, noted, he was still the youngest on the active list, and “with good health he stands a splendid chance of some day becoming head of the army.”21

  With the appointment came even more welcome news. He and Louise and the children were going back to the States. He would be heading up the IV Corps Area outside Atlanta, to assume the full duties of an American two-star general in peacetime.

  His career was on the move again. As their ship set sail with five Filipino servants and Louise’s pile of steamer trunks and furniture, Douglas MacArthur must have wondered if he would ever see those islands again.

  Indeed he would, sooner than he thought. But not before he, and the army, had gone through a wrenching series of crises, both personal and professional.

  And when he returned, he would be alone.

  —

  For the newly minted major general, Atlanta’s main attractions weren’t the duties of heading IV Corps Area, which included such exciting feats as sending troops from Fort Bragg to help rescue miners trapped in a North Carolina mine explosion and overseeing the summer training of ROTC volunteers and reservists. It was wandering northwest of town to visit the battlefields where his father had served during the Civil War. In his memoirs he says, “They became daily sites to me”—and daily reminders of the price of valor in an America determined to forget about war, suffering, and sacrifice.22

  One was Kennesaw Mountain, where Major Arthur MacArthur had led the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin on June 24, 1864, in a reconnaissance against Confederate forces. Now his son wandered along the south face of the mountain, where the Wisconsin men had come under withering fire from rebel rifle pits and nineteen-year-old Arthur took a bullet in the chest. He went down at once; his men assumed he was dead. But minutes later he was miraculously on his feet and leading his men again, in an orderly retreat, leaving twenty-five dead and wounded behind.

  Back at camp the regimental surgeon examined his wound. Luckily the bullet had been spent and had wedged itself under the skin, directly over his heart, but somehow it hadn’t penetrated farther. They all wondered why, MacArthur included. What they found was that a packet of letters in his chest pocket from his father the judge had cushioned the impact and let him escape death with no more than a bad bruise. A good story for a laugh around the campfire, and one to tell his sons years later—but also a reminder of how close and sudden mortality can be on the battlefield.23

  Then the younger MacArthur wandered through the groves of Peach Tree Creek where Union forces on July 20 met a savage attack by Confederate troops under their new general, John Bell Hood, and again the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin had been in the thick of it. “On the enemy came again and again,” a Twenty-fourth veteran, Moritz Tschepe, remembered. “They came without skirmishers and with yells whose volume exceeded any battle shout ever heard,” as Union troops poured on volley after volley and fired grapeshot at the charging rebels almost point-blank. The fighting went on until nearly dark, when MacArthur’s bone-weary men were finally able to drop to their knees and lay down their rifles. Ringed around them were the bodies of nearly 4,800 Confederate dead and wounded, to 1,710 Union casualties.24

  The crash of guns, the roar of musketry, faint bugle calls and drums beating the long roll: Mac must have fancied he could hear them all, then could hear them fade to silence. They had fallen silent in his own time; but would the army to which both he and his father had dedicated their lives be ready when the sound of guns returned, this time on a scale no one—certainly not his father—could ever have imagined?

  For months he had been expressing his worries to General Wood, who in contrast to Pershing had been a keen supporter of MacArthur’s promotion.25

  Finally the army had listened to Wood, and MacArthur had a major general’s two stars. But now MacArthur wondered if there would be an army modern and competent enough for an officer like himself to command. It was a question he would be confronting head-on in only few months, but far away in Baltimore.

  —

  This was because his father’s deeds had made him a marked man in Atlanta. MacArthur and his staff discovered this the first time they attended Sunday service at a local Episcopal church. As he and his men took their seats, heads swiveled and words were whispered. More heads turned and the buzz of conversation began to drown out the service. Then, one by one, three-quarters of the congregation got up and left.26

  A furious MacArthur fired off a telegram to the War Department request
ing an immediate transfer. It came three months later, to III Corps Area with its headquarters at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, and MacArthur gratefully left the city of Atlanta to the bitter memories of the vanquished.

  Baltimore was a double blessing because it was only a twenty-minute drive from Louise’s estate at Rainbow Hill, and closer to Washington, where his mother was living, frail and ill but as much a charismatic presence as ever. But it was also the setting for tragedy, because barely he had unpacked his trunks when “one of the most distasteful orders I ever received” reached his desk.27

  He was to preside at the court-martial of his friend Colonel Billy Mitchell.

  —

  On July 21, 1921, Mitchell and fellow pilots at the controls of a Martin B-1 bomber had sunk a confiscated German battleship, the Ostfriesland, in waters off Chesapeake Bay—the first time a naval vessel had been sunk by aerial attack, a vessel dubbed by its German builders and American inspectors as unsinkable. Then just to prove it was no fluke, Mitchell did the same twice more in 1923, this time to decommissioned American battleships. In Mitchell’s mind, he had proved once and for all that the airplane was now the dominant weapon of modern warfare. No country, no city, and certainly no navy in the world was safe.

  Admirals and officials at the Navy Department furiously denied that assertion—and many in the army were just as doubtful. Was the army supposed to shift resources to this new experimental technology, the airplane, versus the tried-and-true military arms that had sustained the army through a world war? Next they’ll be telling the cavalry they have to give up their horses, Mitchell’s colleagues scoffed after their second Scotch at the officers’ club. What they did not realize was that they too had been shown the future—how a new technology in sufficient quantity and in the right hands could bring decisive results on the battlefield. However, they chose to turn their backs on it, and on Mitchell.