Douglas MacArthur

• 1. Introduction

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  Douglas MacArthur was born on the 26th of January 1880 at Little Rock Barracks in Arkansas, the son of a Union Army captain who had earned the Medal of Honor at Missionary Ridge. He would go on to hold commands that no American soldier had held before or since, and he would die in 1964 having been both celebrated as the savior of the Pacific and condemned as a man who placed his ego above his orders.

  He was nominated for the Medal of Honor three times and eventually received it, though the Army's own adjutant general would later conclude that the authority for that award was questionable. He is one of only five people in American history to hold the rank of General of the Army, and the only person ever to hold the rank of Field Marshal in the Philippine Army. His mother moved into a hotel overlooking the West Point campus when he enrolled, and she was still by his side when he became the most powerful foreign figure in the Philippines three decades later.

  What shaped a man capable of reforming a military academy, organizing a presidential campaign from the battlefield, and accepting the formal surrender of Japan on the deck of a warship? And how did that same man come to be fired by the President of the United States in the middle of a war?

• 2. A Military Childhood

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  Arthur MacArthur Jr. was not an easy father to follow. He had been promoted to lieutenant general and carried the Medal of Honor. He had fought for the Union in the Civil War while his wife Pinky's brothers had fought for the South, a split so bitter that two of those brothers refused to attend the wedding.

  Douglas was the youngest of three sons. His brother Malcolm died of measles in 1883, a fact that colored the family's early years on the frontier posts of the American Old West. In his memoir, Reminiscences, MacArthur wrote that he had learned to ride and shoot before he could read or write. Until around age eight, his mother dressed him in skirts and kept his hair in curls, a detail that would follow him into biographies for the rest of his life.

  At the West Texas Military Academy in San Antonio, he was a quarterback, a shortstop, and a tennis player. His final year average was 97.33 out of 100, and he was named valedictorian. His father and grandfather tried to secure him a presidential appointment to West Point, approaching both Grover Cleveland and William McKinley. Both were rejected. The appointment eventually came through Congressman Theobald Otjen after MacArthur passed the examination himself. He later wrote that the lesson he drew from the experience was that preparedness is the key to success.

  When he entered West Point on the 13th of June 1899, his mother moved into a suite at Craney's Hotel, which overlooked the academy grounds. Southern cadets singled him out alongside Ulysses S. Grant III as sons of generals with mothers living on the property.

• 3. West Point and Early Service

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  Hazing was widespread at West Point when MacArthur arrived, and a congressional inquiry was triggered when cadet Oscar Booz left the academy after being hazed and subsequently died of tuberculosis. MacArthur was called to testify, and he named cadets implicated in hazing while downplaying his own experience. Congress outlawed acts of a harassing or humiliating nature, though hazing continued regardless.

  Academically, MacArthur earned 2,424.12 merits out of a possible 2,470.00, an average of 98.14 percent, which was the third-highest score ever recorded at the academy. He graduated first in his class on the 11th of June 1903 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers, the traditional honor for the top-ranked cadet.

  His first overseas posting took him to the Philippines, where he supervised wharf construction at Camp Jossman and conducted surveys at Tacloban City, Calbayog, and Cebu City. In November 1903, while working on Guimaras, he was ambushed by two Filipino guerrillas and shot and killed both. The following year, malaria and dhobi itch cut his tour short and sent him back to San Francisco.

  In October 1905, he was appointed aide-de-camp to his father in Tokyo. A man who knew both MacArthurs at the time wrote that Arthur MacArthur was the most flamboyantly egotistical man he had ever seen, until he met his son. The two toured Japanese military bases at Nagasaki, Kobe, and Kyoto before traveling through India, China, and Southeast Asia. Back in Washington, Douglas was assigned to assist at White House functions at the request of President Theodore Roosevelt.

• 4. World War I and the Rainbow Division

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  After America entered World War I following the declaration of war on Germany on the 6th of April 1917, MacArthur pressed for a novel solution to the question of which state's National Guard units would serve on the Western Front. He suggested organizing a division from units drawn across many different states, so no single state could claim preferential treatment. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker approved the idea. The resulting formation became the 42nd Division, nicknamed the Rainbow Division, and MacArthur was its chief of staff, skipping the rank of lieutenant colonel to become a colonel.

  The 42nd entered the line in the quiet Luneville sector in February 1918. On the 26th of that month, MacArthur accompanied a French trench raid and helped capture German prisoners. French Major General Georges de Bazelaire decorated him with the Croix de Guerre, the first ever awarded to a member of the American Expeditionary Forces.

  MacArthur was strict about requiring his men to carry their gas masks, but he often neglected to bring his own. He was gassed in March and then gassed again during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in October. On the second occasion he was on a night reconnaissance patrol into no man's land to confirm the location of a gap in German barbed wire. The squad was fired upon with artillery and machine guns. MacArthur was the sole survivor.

  By the end of the war, he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross twice, the Silver Star seven times, and two Wound Chevrons. He was promoted to brigadier general on the 26th of June 1918, making him the youngest general in the AEF until October, when Lesley J. McNair and Pelham D. Glassford, both aged thirty-five, also received promotions. General Henri Gouraud of the French Fourth Army said that MacArthur was one of the finest and bravest officers he had ever served with. MacArthur was one of only three American generals wounded or killed in action in the entire war, and the only one who held the rank of general.

• 5. Reforming West Point

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  In June 1919, MacArthur became Superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy, the most prestigious posting in the Army by some accounts. Accepting it allowed him to retain his temporary rank of brigadier general rather than reverting to his substantive rank of major. At the time of his appointment, he was the youngest superintendent since Sylvanus Thayer in 1817.

  He inherited an institution that had been reduced to something close to an officer candidate school during the war, with five classes graduated in just two years. Cadet morale was low, hazing was at what observers called an all-time peak of viciousness, and the curriculum had not caught up with a world transformed by the conflict MacArthur had just survived. During his time governing the Rhineland, he had noticed that West Point graduates often had limited knowledge of anything outside military science.

  His first act was to restore the four-year course after Congress had set it at three years. He formalized the previously unwritten Cadet Honor Code in 1922 by forming the Cadet Honor Committee, which was elected by the cadets and acted as a kind of grand jury without punishing authority. He replaced traditional summer camp at Fort Clinton with training by regular Army sergeants at Fort Dix, using modern weapons. Cadets then marched back to West Point carrying full packs.

  He expanded the intramural sports program and required every cadet to participate. He sanctioned a cadet newspaper called The Brag, gave cadets a monthly allowance of five dollars, and permitted them to travel to watch football games. Professors and alumni protested most of these changes. Many of his reforms were initially discarded, though they were gradually restored in the following years.

• 6. The Bonus Army and New Deal Years

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  By 1930, MacArthur was fifty years old and still the Army's youngest and best-known major general. On the 21st of November that year, he was sworn in as Chief of Staff of the United States Army with the rank of general. At his desk, he wore a Japanese ceremonial kimono, cooled himself with an oriental fan, and smoked cigarettes in a jeweled cigarette holder. One contemporary described him as the greatest actor ever to serve as a U.S. Army general; another wrote that he had a court rather than a staff.

  In 1932, thousands of World War I veterans who called themselves the Bonus Army converged on Washington to demand early payment of bonuses promised for their service. MacArthur had initially sent camp equipment and mobile kitchens to the demonstrators. After two veterans were shot and died in a clash with District police, President Herbert Hoover ordered MacArthur to surround the affected area and clear it. MacArthur decided to accompany the troops personally, against the explicit advice of Major Dwight D. Eisenhower. In less than four hours, tear gas and troops with bayonets and sabers cleared the campground. The gas canisters started fires, causing the only death in the operation. Though less violent than similar operations elsewhere, it was a public relations disaster.

  In 1934, after journalists Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen described his treatment of the Bonus marchers as unwarranted, unnecessary, insubordinate, harsh, and brutal, MacArthur sued them for $750,000. The journalists threatened to call MacArthur's mistress, Isabel Rosario Cooper, whom he had met in the Philippines, as a witness. He settled out of court, secretly paying Pearson $15,000.

  His service as chief of staff had lasting consequences beyond the controversies. He ordered that the M1 Garand rifle use the .30-06 Springfield round rather than the newer .276 Pedersen round, allowing the military to use a single ammunition type across weapons. He also promoted General Frank M. Andrews from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general and placed him in command of a centralized air command. Andrews used that position to covertly develop the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress to the point that when President Roosevelt endorsed four-engine bombers in 1940, the aircraft was ready for immediate production.

• 7. Field Marshal of the Philippines

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  When the Philippines achieved semi-independent status in 1935, President Manuel Quezon, a longtime friend of MacArthur's, asked him to build a Philippine Army from scratch. With President Roosevelt's approval, MacArthur accepted. The arrangement made him the best-paid soldier in the world: he received the salary of a field marshal in the Philippine Army on top of his salary as Military Advisor to the Commonwealth Government.

  Eisenhower later learned that the title of field marshal had not been Quezon's idea at all. Quezon told him that MacArthur himself had come up with it. Quezon officially conferred the title at Malacañan Palace on the 24th of August 1936.

  On the voyage from San Francisco in October 1935, MacArthur's mother became gravely ill and died in Manila on the 3rd of December 1935. Also on board the ship was Jean Marie Faircloth, an unmarried thirty-seven-year-old socialite. MacArthur married her in a civil ceremony on the 30th of April 1937. Their son, Arthur MacArthur IV, was born in Manila on the 21st of February 1938.

  Building the Philippine Army proved harder than anticipated. When the first group of 20,000 trainees reported in early 1937, few of the training camps had actually been constructed. Equipment was described as more or less obsolete American cast-offs, and the budget was wholly inadequate. The 1922 Washington Naval Treaty had prohibited the expansion or modernization of military bases in the Pacific, including Corregidor, whose Malinta Tunnel had been built from 1932 to 1934 using condemned TNT without a dollar of U.S. government funding. MacArthur officially retired from the U.S. Army on the 31st of December 1937, though he remained as Quezon's civilian adviser. When he left, Eisenhower was replaced as chief of staff by Lieutenant Colonel Richard K. Sutherland.

• 8. World War II and the Fall of the Philippines

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  On the 26th of July 1941, Roosevelt recalled MacArthur to active duty and named him commander of U.S. Army Forces in the Far East. At 03:30 local time on the 8th of December 1941, Sutherland learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor and informed MacArthur. Chief of Staff George Marshall ordered MacArthur to execute war plan Rainbow Five, but MacArthur did not follow the order. General Lewis Brereton, commander of the Far East Air Force, requested permission three times to attack Japanese bases in Formosa; each time, Sutherland refused. Not until 11:00 did Brereton speak directly with MacArthur. At 12:30, Japanese aircraft achieved complete tactical surprise at Clark Field, destroying or disabling 18 of the Far East Air Force's 35 B-17s along with 53 of 107 P-40s. Eighty personnel were killed and 150 wounded.

  MacArthur's plan to hold all of Luzon collapsed quickly. After Japanese forces landed at Lingayen Gulf on the 21st of December, he ordered a retreat to Bataan. Most supplies were abandoned in the confusion. Manila was declared an open city at midnight on the 24th of December, and MacArthur moved his headquarters to the fortress island of Corregidor. In the first air raid on Corregidor, on the 29th of December, bombs destroyed MacArthur's house on Topside. One bomb struck only ten feet from MacArthur. Filipino Sergeant Domingo Adversario was awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart for covering MacArthur's head with his own helmet, which was struck by shrapnel.

  On the 1st of January 1942, MacArthur accepted $500,000 from President Quezon as payment for his pre-war service. His staff members also received payments. The payments were known to Roosevelt and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson but were kept from the public until historian Carol Petillo disclosed them in 1979.

  In March 1942, Roosevelt ordered MacArthur out of the Philippines. On the night of the 12th of March, MacArthur, his wife Jean, their son Arthur, Arthur's Cantonese amah Loh Chui, and senior staff including Sutherland, Richard Marshall, and Huff departed Corregidor in PT boats through stormy seas patrolled by Japanese warships. They reached Del Monte Airfield on Mindanao, where B-17s flew them to Australia. MacArthur arrived in Melbourne by train on the 21st of March. At Terowie railway station on the 20th, he made his declaration: "I came through and I shall return." Washington asked him to amend it to "We shall return." He ignored the request. Bataan surrendered on the 9th of April; Corregidor fell on the 6th of May.