The Yanks Are Coming! (19 page)

It was that quality, too, which helped him in what he called the “most poignant episode during my role as Chief of Staff”: dispersing the “Bonus March” on Washington. In 1932, thousands of unemployed veterans (or purported veterans; Hoover and MacArthur thought most of them were frauds) camped out in Washington demanding relief. For weeks, the authorities treated them gently and encouraged them to go home (and offered to pay their way). Still, perhaps ten thousand remained, and as incidents of crime increased, as well as intimations of Communist influence among the marchers, the police were ordered to move them out. The police were met with violence, and the president ordered MacArthur in with the Army. MacArthur succeeded in pushing the marchers out of Washington, and under the circumstances, it was extraordinary that the marchers—or at least the Communists among them looking for a fight—were evicted so easily. Nevertheless, the image of American troops, a zealous MacArthur at their head, shoving unemployed men, whether veterans or not, out of Washington made many liberals view MacArthur with suspicion. MacArthur had no doubts and felt vindicated by later testimony about Communist activists behind the marchers. But to liberals, MacArthur seemed too much an American Caesar, a man who might, someday, reach for the purple.
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Franklin Roosevelt, elected president in 1932, shared this suspicion, though not to the point of accepting MacArthur's resignation
when it was offered during a heated budget discussion. He kept MacArthur on for an extra year past the end of the chief of staff's traditional four-year term. Besides saving the Army from budget cuts that might have utterly eviscerated it, MacArthur won Roosevelt's favor with the Army's work in operating the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In 1935, MacArthur became that unlikely thing for an American general—a field marshal, albeit a field marshal of the Philippine army, a rank that went along with his role as military advisor to the Philippines, which was on a congressionally mandated track to become independent in 1946. He had been invited by Manuel Quezon, who had won election as president of the Philippine Commonwealth in September 1935. MacArthur's job was to ensure that the Philippines could defend itself when it became independent, something American military planners thought was impossible. While most American strategists considered the Philippines peripheral or a liability to America's security interests, MacArthur saw the Philippines as the keystone of America's influence in Asia and the Pacific. It was here, not in Europe, that the future would be made. In the event of a Japanese invasion of the Philippines, Army and Navy war planners envisioned a speedy American withdrawal. To MacArthur, this was heresy and defeatism. The Philippines, he thought, had to be and could be defended. MacArthur's plan was for a small, professional army, with a well-trained, Swiss-style ready-reserve to be called up in time of war, supplemented by a fleet of swift PT boats navigating between the islands. This combined stinging force could make attacking the Philippines too painful for any potential aggressor to contemplate. It also offered Quezon the possibility of defending the 7,100-island archipelago on the relative cheap and in time for independence (though Quezon hoped the American military would stay). Opposition to
MacArthur's plan from Frank Murphy (the American high commissioner to the Philippines and soon to be governor of Michigan), as well as from other isolationist and pacifist-leaning liberals in the administration and in Congress, convinced MacArthur to resign from the U.S. Army at the end of 1937. He returned to the Philippines as a civilian military advisor—fully expecting to be recalled to the colors in case of war.

While MacArthur's plans were meant to be economical, political realities made them unaffordable. MacArthur's annual budget amounted to less than a third of the $25 million his staff said was necessary to defend the islands (and fell to as little as $1 million in 1940). Support MacArthur expected from the United States was either denied or else doled out with congressional parsimony, his plan was opposed by Quezon, and Filipino recruit training was often more a matter of advancing rudimentary education than passing on military instruction and drill. It seemed to Quezon that the Japanese were the more virile force in the Pacific, and that perhaps it might be wiser to seek an accommodation with the Rising Sun than to rely on MacArthur and the Americans.

But for all these frustrations, MacArthur was happy in his role in the Philippines—because he was perfectly cast for it by birth and by temperament, and because on his passage to Manila he had met the perfect field marshal's lady, Jean Marie Faircloth, a poised, attractive, vivacious, wealthy, never-married thirty-seven-year-old Southerner and Daughter of the Confederacy who became the second Mrs. MacArthur. They were married in 1937, had a son the following year, and were utterly devoted to each other. Like his mother, she held sacred the flame of Robert E. Lee; and unlike MacArthur's first wife, she was a duty, honor, country gal, not a flapper; she venerated soldiers, patriotism, and the domestic virtues.

Theirs was, for a while, a colonial idyll, even against a backdrop of looming war. In 1941, after the Japanese invasion of French Indo-China, MacArthur was made commander of the U.S. Army Forces in the Far East, and American supplies suddenly flowed to the Philippines. The brigadier general of the Great War was now, in rapid succession, major general and then lieutenant general in an even bigger war, with a theater of operations that covered the entire Pacific.
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“I SHALL RETURN”

The attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on 7 December 1941, however, had caught him by surprise; and he was not prepared for the Japanese attack on the Philippines the next day. His air force was pinned to the ground, and much of it was destroyed. After its main base at Cavite Bay was bombed by the Japanese, the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, save for PT boats and a contingent of sailors and Marines (numbering about 4,300 men), evacuated (the fleet would make its last gallant stand on the Java Sea and Sunda Strait in early 1942). With the Japanese invasion, the years of neglect of the Philippine army reaped their reward. On 23 December, MacArthur scrapped any aggressive plans he had and ordered a fighting retreat to Bataan on the island of Corregidor. Ever mindful—this was a constant in his career—to shield civilians as much as he could, he declared Manila an open city. The Japanese would prove not as considerate as MacArthur.

The defense of Bataan was heroic. MacArthur, as in the First World War, was supremely indifferent to enemy shelling. But because he spent so much time in his underground headquarters at the fortress of Corregidor, he gained, to his dismay, the moniker of “Dugout
Doug” from the “battling bastards” of Bataan (as they were dubbed by a war correspondent). What finally defeated the battling bastards was not so much the Japanese as a lack of food, ammunition, and supplies of all kinds, not to mention malaria and every other jungle plague that struck the vast majority of the troops.
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President Franklin Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to evacuate to Australia. On 12 March 1942, he, his family, and some members of his staff boarded four submarine-dodging PT boats (three of them made it), and MacArthur was successfully spirited to Del Monte Airfield on Mindanao, whence he was flown to Batchelor Field in Australia in a B-17. It was here that he told reporters, “The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary object of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.”
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It was not just the Filipinos he needed to inspire but Australians who thought they were next on the conquest list of Dai Nippon. The fact that MacArthur was awarded the Medal of Honor helped, as did Roosevelt's decision to send two divisions to Australia (MacArthur was shocked that there were only twenty-five thousand American troops there). MacArthur, who was deeply shaken by his defeat in the Philippines, kept up a brave face, and as he assembled his American-Australian force and took the battle to the enemy, starting in New Guinea, his sense of destiny returned—and so too did his sartorial command presence: the field marshal's cap, the aviator's leather jacket (he had become an evangelist for air power), the sunglasses, the corn cob pipe (he was a dedicated smoker). His troops notched up victories in slogging campaigns in New Guinea, expelling the Japanese from some of the most hostile terrain on the planet. As they marched their
way north toward the Philippines, MacArthur went with them, exposing himself to enemy fire to dispel the “Dugout Doug” calumny.

As the Allies advanced in the Pacific, Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations and commander in chief of the United States Fleet, proposed bypassing the Philippines. For MacArthur it was a matter of national, and personal, honor that this not happen. Complicating the situation was that some members of the Republican Party wanted to tap an already existing populist movement and run MacArthur for president in 1944. MacArthur let this romantic, and extremely unlikely, possibility play out until it became a threat to his continuing command of the southwest Pacific, from which President Roosevelt could dismiss him. Desperate not to lose his chance to liberate the Philippines and force the surrender of imperial Japan, he belatedly repudiated any political ambitions in April 1944.

In Hawaii in July he met directly with President Roosevelt and Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, to press his case for the liberation of the Philippines. He won the argument. On 20 October 1944, he waded ashore at “Red Beach” (Palo Beach), at Leyte Island. MacArthur chose to make his appearance here because it was where the fighting was reportedly the hardest. With Japanese snipers still only yards away from where he stood on the beach, he proclaimed, “People of the Philippines: I have returned.”
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From Leyte it was on to Luzon and the liberation of Manila in February 1945, where again MacArthur did everything he could to minimize civilian casualties. The Japanese commander, however, Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi, did the reverse, murdering civilians and leaving the city a smoldering ruin.

While fighting continued in the Philippines, MacArthur (who had become a five-star “General of the Army” in December 1944)
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directed the liberation of Borneo, again at the front, nearly oblivious
to the gunfire around him (even as it killed a photographer trying to get his picture). He was named commander in chief of the U.S. Army Forces of the Pacific. After the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August), the Japanese Empire was finished. MacArthur formally accepted Japan's surrender aboard the USS
Missouri
in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. But that was not the end for MacArthur. As supreme commander of the Allied Powers, he became the shogun who would rebuild shattered Japan, giving it a new democratic constitution (still reserving a place for the emperor), demilitarizing Japanese society, punishing war criminals (a distasteful but necessary duty to him), keeping the Soviets out of the occupation, encouraging the spread of Christianity,
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instituting a free press, promoting major land reform, creating a free-enterprise economy, encouraging the formation of independent trade unions that could not coerce workers to join (an important principle to MacArthur), and acting in essence as a kindly, beneficent dictator until handing over power to the newly elected Japanese government in 1949.

THE KOREAN WAR

MacArthur was seventy years old and still in Japan as supreme commander of the Allied Powers when North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950. The Truman administration had taken little interest in South Korea. American occupation troops, stationed there at the end of the Second World War, had been rapidly withdrawn, and Secretary of State Dean Acheson had publicly, in a speech, left it outside the arc of American interests in Asia and the Pacific. But to Japan, a Korea united under an aggressive Communist regime was
a major threat. The Truman administration did not immediately understand that, but once it did—or once Truman grew incensed enough at Communist North Korea's invasion of South Korea—the president and many of his advisors, who loathed MacArthur and had wanted to remove him from his position in Japan, realized they needed MacArthur to rescue a desperate situation. Once again, MacArthur became a battlefield commander, adding to his titles commander in chief of the United Nations Command.

It was in Korea that MacArthur unleashed the most brilliant stroke of his career—the landing at Inchon, which caught the North Koreans in a double envelopment: the anvil provided by the American and Allied forces at the Pusan Perimeter (the UN defensive positions around the port of Pusan at South Korea's southeastern tip); the hammer coming from the Marines and other units landing at Inchon on 15 September 1950, near the North Korean border. Seoul was liberated, the North Korean army was driven back across the border with heavy losses, and the UN forces moved north, with the possibility of a united non-Communist Korea apparently in the offing.

MacArthur's great gamble had come up trumps. What came next, however, was a turnabout that ended his career: a massive Red Chinese intervention that he did not expect. Nor, when he realized its magnitude, could he crush it, as he had hoped, with air power. Instead, victory appeared to turn to disaster as the North Koreans recaptured Seoul in January 1951 and MacArthur pleaded for massive reinforcements, without which, he said, the war was lost. It was General Matthew Ridgway, appointed by MacArthur to take command of the U.S. Eighth Army in late December 1950, who turned the tide against the North Koreans and Communist Chinese, driving them out of Seoul and back across the border in
March 1951. Ridgway's success and MacArthur's criticisms of Truman administration policy made MacArthur dispensable to an administration that had wanted to sack him ever since it had come to power. He was relieved of his command—and because the news had leaked and the administration wanted to make an official announcement before it hit the presses, he discovered the fact from news reports of a 1:00 a.m. press conference announcing it. In MacArthur's words, “No office boy, no charwoman, no servant of any sort would have been dismissed with such callous disregard for the ordinary decencies”
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as he had been dismissed by President Truman. Nevertheless, he returned a war hero, addressed a joint session of Congress (MacArthur was a far more popular man than the president), and became a political hero to Republicans, who took his comment that “there can be no substitute for victory”
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as incisive wisdom ignored by Truman and his administration.