IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME that Patton met Dwight D. Eisenhower, also a lieutenant colonel, five years his junior, who had graduated from West Point in 1915—“the class the stars fell on.” While Patton had been in France fighting Germans, Eisenhower had established and run the army’s largest tank training center near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Frustrated that he never went to France, Eisenhower complained, “I suppose we’ll spend the rest of our lives explaining why we didn’t get into this war.”13
The two men could hardly have been less alike in temperament—or more alike in ambition. They were also neighbors and played poker twice a week, not to mention rode, hunted and fished, and made Prohibition-era homebrew and bathtub gin together. Once they even staked out a dangerous road at night, armed to the teeth, looking to foil a highway robber who never took the bait.
Mostly they shared a common interest in the future of the tank, and the two became nothing less than zealots in absorbing every aspect of tank warfare, from the vehicle itself, to its armaments, to its usage on the field of battle. A new-styled tank created by a New Jersey inventor named J. Walter Christie intrigued them. It could travel up to sixty miles per hour, climb a two-and-a-half-foot wall, and jump a seven-foot ditch. Patton soon began working with Christie and his armored inventions—including a forerunner of the amphibious tank—in what would be a decade-long collaboration. Some said he personally financed Christie too.
But during those austere years, as the cavalry was being phased out of the army, few mechanized vehicles were brought in to replace horses. This was so frustrating to young, talented officers like Patton and Eisenhower that the two retorted by publishing articles in the Infantry Journal suggesting, among other things, that the tank would someday lead the infantry into battle.
The motto of the U.S. Infantry is “Follow Me,” so this kind of heresy naturally elicited a strong response, including reprimands to both men from high-ranking infantry officers in the Washington military bureaucracy.
Even worse, during the congressional sessions to reorganize the army after the war, despite pleas by Secretary of War Newton Baker, Chief of Staff Peyton March, and the enormously influential Major General Charles P. Summerall to make the Tank Corps an independent branch of the army, opposing testimony by Pershing “sounded the death knell” of it. Instead, the Tank Corps was placed under the supervision of the chief of infantry and eventually would lose both its identity and its raison d’être—a bitter pill for Patton and his courageous pioneers whose blood stained the battlefields of Europe.
Given that the tank was now under the infantry, Patton would have to decide whether to change branches of service. With the Tank Corps’ future seemingly at a dead end, Patton became once more the beau ideal of the gentleman cavalry officer. More than ever, he enjoyed the romance of that elite and social organization—foxhunting, playing polo, skeet shooting, tennis, engaging in events in swordsmanship, horse racing, and steeplechasing.
That same year, from the gloomy, greasy, dusty tank laagers of Fort Meade, Maryland, he was transferred to the spit-and-polish greenswards of Fort Myer, Virginia, where he arrived with a veritable stable full of animals to assume command of a squadron (battalion) of the Third U.S. Cavalry Regiment.
The Pattons moved into a spacious brick Victorian house at number 5 Officers Row, while George settled into running the business of the Third Squadron, which at Fort Myer was a mostly ceremonial unit that escorted funerals of dignitaries at the adjacent Arlington National Cemetery or rode in parades. This gave Patton plenty of time for his recreational sports at the various foxhunting clubs in northern Virginia and he and Beatrice became regulars on the high society social circuits in the Roaring Twenties in and about the capital city.
That is not to suggest that Patton had become a dilettante or a dabbler. He took his duties as a trainer of military men very seriously; in fact, his corps program was to train his officers to be trainers, and he personally delivered a lecture to his charges nearly every other day.14
Patton was a superior teacher and he drilled into his men his own special tenets of cavalry warfare. “Success in War,” he wrote, “depends upon the Golden Rule of War: Speed-Simplicity-Boldness.” “Offensive combat,” he insisted, “consists of FIRE and MOVEMENT. The purpose of FIRE is to permit MOVEMENT.” A leader, he said, if things go badly, “must ride up and rally his men personally.” If his men still break and run, then the leader “SHOULD NOT SURVIVE IT. THERE IS NOTHING MORE PATHETIC AND FUTILE THAN A GENERAL WHO LIVES LONG ENOUGH TO EXPLAIN A DEFEAT.”15
He also created at Fort Myer a monumentally successful money-raising ploy for the Soldiers Rest and Recreation Fund, a charity designed to help the enlisted men whose pay was so low that most could not even afford to marry, let alone partake of other off-post delights. Patton organized and inaugurated a succession of spectacular exhibitions in Fort Myer’s large indoor riding arena. With nearly eighteen hundred spectators looking on, what came to be known as the Society Circus was held every Friday afternoon from January to April. It featured jumping, trick riding stunts, and acrobatics by the cavalrymen, as well as large routines involving music and dozens of riders performing precision drills. Soon these spaces were filled by the area debutantes and their families—the young ladies always interested in some handsome eligible bachelor officer. In succeeding years the event was held on Sunday afternoons, and wealthy families as well as cabinet members, congressmen, and senators bought boxes in which they threw fashionable luncheon parties while the regiment’s expert horsemen entertained in the riding ring. The coffers of the Soldiers Rest and Recreation Fund swelled while Patton himself immensely enjoyed riding, jumping, and “doing his stuff” in front of the crowd.
Whenever Patton was not working or playing polo he darted off to horse shows up and down the East Coast, bringing back basketsful of ribbons and enough silver cups to line an entire wall at number 5 Officers Row. While training with the army polo team on Long Island, in the summer of 1922, Patton managed to make friends with the likes of the Belmonts, Harrimans, and other society swells, remarking in a letter to Beatrice that “These are the nicest rich people I have ever seen.”
But beneath this veneer of social status and sportsmanship Patton seethed. Without a war to fight, he was bitter and unhappy, even lapsing into depressions that today might be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. When in a foul mood, he would do and say outlandish things, mostly to gauge the reaction of the unsuspecting. George Marshall said of him, “He would say outrageous things and then look at you to see how it registered; curse and then go write a hymn.”‡,16
Yet Patton persevered. In 1923 during a day-sailing trip in rough seas off Salem, Massachusetts, Patton and Bea came upon a small capsized boat and managed to fish out of the water three boys who would have undoubtedly drowned had the Pattons not come to the rescue. Newspapers gave the story great play, and Patton was once again lauded as a hero.
Later that year, he attended the Advanced Officers Course of the U.S. Army’s Cavalry School at Fort Riley, Kansas, finishing in the top percentile of his class. While there, he became a master at the machine gun, in addition to his swordsmanship. Patton’s high standing entitled him to attend the rigorous Army General Service school (ultimately the Command and General Staff College), where, according to Patton’s daughter, “more homes are broken up, there are more suicides and more cases of battered children from the tour at Leavenworth than anyone will ever officially know.”17 The competition to get high rankings—thus raising chances for promotion—was so great as to push men beyond their limits.
It was therefore doubly troubling for Patton when he was one day, in December 1923, summoned before the board and told that he had been accused of using an unauthorized study aid—in effect, cheating—that consisted of a mysterious bluish light that he allegedly employed while reading texts. The embarrassed Patton had to explain that he had recently purchased a “purple light” that purportedly was able to cure baldness, and a classmate who was passing by P
atton’s quarters while he studied at a desk by the window had apparently noticed it. “He stopped using the light—he went on getting bald,” his daughter said.18
THERE WAS NO GRAND HERO’S WELCOME for Douglas MacArthur and his famed 42nd Rainbow Division when they arrived in New York on the ocean liner Leviathan (ex-Vaterland) on April 25, 1919. Neither the division—whose soldiers had voted against “any welcoming parades”—nor American citizens, who by then “had tired of parading doughboys,” were upset that they didn’t have to engage in another great extravaganza. The soldiers, however, were nevertheless disappointed when the great ship pulled to the dock and barely a soul was there to greet them save for a “small urchin who asked if we had been in France,” said MacArthur. He himself was dressed in an enormous raccoon-skin coat that he acquired from God knows where, and a long scarf knitted by his mother, Pinky. “We marched off the dock to be scattered to the four winds—a sad, gloomy end of the Rainbow.”19
MacArthur received orders to report to the chief of staff of the army in Washington, who immediately appointed him superintendent of the United States Military Academy, informing the startled thirty-nine-year-old brigadier that “West Point is forty years behind the times.”
It was too true. During the course of the war, the army had lost so many officers (nearly ten thousand had become casualties in France) that cadets were being graduated as eighteen- and nineteen-year-old plebes—after only one year of training and school. Consequently, the place was a mess. There were no upperclassmen to train the youngsters and discipline was almost nonexistent. The urgent need to cram military subjects down the throats of this inexperienced cannon fodder had turned West Point into just another officers’ training school and the academy was “reduced to a pitiable state as a result of the actions of the War Department.” Faculty had been let go to join the fighting and the curriculum was in chaos.
Worse still, there was an undercurrent of decidedly antimilitary sentiment in postwar America that argued: “Why have a West Point at all if the country had just fought the war to end all wars—the war to save democracy for all time?” These people, MacArthur found—including some in Congress—would have abolished West Point in favor of Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) in colleges in the name of economy and an attitude of “never again.”20
Nevertheless, in June 1919, MacArthur moved into the imposing brick and filigree superintendent’s mansion at the Plain with his sixty-six-year-old mother. Initially, MacArthur had resisted the appointment, arguing that he was “a field soldier,” but the fact that, as superintendent, he would remain a brigadier general instead of reverting to his prewar rank of major convinced him otherwise.
As when he disembarked the Leviathan, there was no welcoming ceremony or review of the corps upon his arrival. This, however, was on MacArthur’s personal instructions. They had marched enough already, he said, and would march far more during the courses of their lives, to have to march on his behalf. “They’ll see me soon and often enough,” he told his chief of staff.21
MacArthur quickly sought to restore order and took his case to Congress. Learning that it planned to restore West Point to a three-year college, the new (and youngest in more than a hundred years) superintendent persuaded that body to expand the cadet corps to a full four years of classes within two years. He quickly developed “a burning desire,” in the words of biographer Clayton James, “to reform West Point on the basis of his experiences in the war.”
During the fighting in France, MacArthur had numerous occasions to witness the behavior of West Pointers who, for the most part, performed admirably with one glaring flaw—an inability to cope with the civilian draftees and volunteers who made up the bulk of the modern army. Their experiences at the military academy had left them hidebound. Accustomed to ordering and receiving immediate obedience from those cadets beneath them, these officers were flummoxed and disconcerted when confronted by often rebellious soldiers for whom submission to military orders was a foreign notion.22
After months of studying and analyzing new criteria for the military academy and its cadets, MacArthur determined that “Improvisation will be the watchword.” The changed conditions in warfare demonstrated by the First World War required a “modification of the type of officer [that West Point produced], a type possessing all the cardinal military virtues as of yore, but possessing an intimate understanding of his fellows, a comprehensive grasp of world and national affairs, and a liberalization of conception which amounts to a change in his psychology of command.” Accordingly, MacArthur decreed that the corps would abandon its regular, limited summer encampment altogether and billeted the upperclassmen with regular army brigades in order for them to get a chance to see what the real army was all about.23
MacArthur ran into trouble, however, when he tried to change West Point’s academic curriculum. He wanted less math and more of the humanities—literature, history, philosophy, government, social sciences, geopolitics. But the academic department was filled with mossbacks who resisted change. On the academic committee, the superintendent had only one vote, and many of West Point’s longtime professors resented his intervening on what they saw as their turf. “Looks like another effort to wreck the Academy,” one of them said.
Nevertheless, MacArthur did manage to coax some changes in favor of the liberal arts. He also saw—for the first time—that each cadet was given $5 a month, as well as six-hour passes on weekends. Among other innovations, each cadet was required to read two newspapers a day and told to be prepared to discuss current events. MacArthur introduced an honor system, under which the cadets were individually and collectively responsible to see that no one cheated. And he saw to it that Civil War battle maps in the tactics instruction rooms were replaced with combat maps from the recent world war.24
MacArthur didn’t stop there. He ordered that the most modern of the army’s weapons be brought to West Point for the cadets to learn and train with, and he organized an intramural sports program and required that all cadets not already playing on some varsity team participate. Upon the gray stone walls of the gym he caused this quatrain to be carved:
Upon the fields of friendly strife
Are sown the seeds
That, upon other fields, on other days
Will bear the fruits of victory.
When Army’s baseball team routed Navy in 1921, the corps staged—against all regulations—a midnight parade that marched past MacArthur’s quarters and made an enormous bonfire on the edge of the drill field where they kept up a raucous cheering into the night. Upon encountering the commandant next morning MacArthur asked, “How many of them did you skin?” When the answer was “Not a damned one,” MacArthur broke into a grin and said, “Good! I could hardly resist the impulse to get out there and join them!”25
MacArthur’s chief of staff during this period, Major William Ganoe, remained in awe of his boss, and wrote about it later, noting “his unwavering aplomb, his astonishing self-mastery. I had seen men who were so placid or stolid they were emotionless. But MacArthur was anything but that. His every tone, look, or movement was the extreme of intense vivacity. As he talked, so he walked jauntily, without swagger. His gait and expression were carefree without being careless. Obedience,” Ganoe wrote, “is something a leader can command, but loyalty is something, an indefinable something, that he is obliged to win. MacArthur knew instinctively how to win it.” A possible reason for all this carefree jauntiness might have been something of which Major Ganoe wasn’t aware at the time. MacArthur had fallen in love.
She was not just any woman, but a thirtyish, formerly married with two children Baltimore socialite named Louise Cromwell Brooks who was said to bear some resemblance to the silent-movie actress Clara Bow. Until she met MacArthur, she had been squired around Washington by none other than the army’s highest-ranking officer, John J. Pershing. To say that she and MacArthur had a whirlwind romance would be a vast understatement. They met at a fashionable party in Tuxedo Park, which lie
s between West Point and New York City, and before the evening was done they were engaged. If MacArthur hadn’t asked her to marry him the first time they met, Louise told the newspapers, “I believe I would have done it myself.” If one did not know MacArthur well, it would be easy to speculate that he had been drinking that night, but because his reputation for moderation was well established it must have been something else.
When the engagement was announced in the January 15, 1922, New York Times, “both Pershing’s and Pinky’s plans lay in ruins,” according to MacArthur’s biographer William Manchester. MacArthur’s mother was mortified at her son’s choice of a frivolous flapper, divorced with two children, and told a friend from her bed, fainting couch, or wherever, “Of course the attraction is purely physical.” Pershing, who evidently assumed a proprietary interest in the woman, was said to be furious at having been bird-dogged and snaked by one of his own officers, nearly twenty years his junior.
Thus—although Pershing publicly denied having a hand in it—MacArthur soon found himself summarily relieved of duty at West Point, a year shy of what was customary, and sent with his bride, at government expense, on a honeymoon cruise to the Philippine Islands—for four years! There is a photograph of them arriving in Manila—he in a sharply tailored suit and she wearing a long featureless dress and one of those little hats of the period that look like a flower pot turned upside down, pulled low over her brow.
IN 1920 MARSHALL WAS PROMOTED to major in the regular army, and in 1923 to lieutenant colonel. In 1924, General Pershing retired and Marshall put in for reassignment with the 15th Infantry Regiment, which had been stationed in Tientsin, China, since the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. On June 12, 1924, he, Lily, and Lily’s mother from Lexington steamed out of New York on the U.S. Army transport St. Mihiel. After a lazy cruise of nearly three months, during which they visited his friends from AEF days who were posted all across the Pacific, they arrived in China on September 7. At last, Marshall had a troop command.