For his part, Patton wrote to Beatrice, “No mother of a bride ever looked better or cried less.”3
The following spring Patton was again ordered to Hawaii and, to celebrate the occasion, he bought a fifty-foot schooner. Named Arcturus, the boat was shipped to Patton by rail, from the East Coast to San Diego. He intended to sail solo across the Pacific to the Hawaiian Islands—despite the fact that he knew little or nothing about ocean navigating, telling Beatrice that he’d “rather be dead than be nobody.”
Of course, in 1935, there weren’t GPS or any other sort of electronic navigation system; getting from one place to another in the vast and trackless wastes of the Pacific was done by celestial navigation using charts, sextant, and chronometer. Patton therefore enrolled in a course in celestial navigation taught at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, which he drove to from Washington three times a week.
Beatrice immediately announced, according to Ruth Ellen, that “she would not let George drown without her,” and so she enlisted as the ship’s cook despite the fact that she had never cooked in her life. By the time they cast off, the crew had grown to six, including friends, cousins, and a Norwegian seaman who had come with the boat. As they pulled away from the dock on a May morning, Patton looked forlornly at the varnished boxes containing the sextant and chronometer and remarked to Beatrice, “We can learn, can’t we?”4
They arrived, somehow, fifteen days and 2,238 miles later, to be greeted at the dock in Honolulu by a brass band and a bevy of hula dancers courtesy of their many friends on the island. Quickly, Patton was made the G-2, or chief intelligence officer, for the Hawaiian Department, but his superior General Hugh Drum, a rather square man who secretly envied Patton’s financial and social superiority, refused to back him up in the “things he discovered about the Japanese underground” and other nefarious activities that would ultimately lead to Pearl Harbor.
An all-expenses-paid two and a half years in Hawaii with your family might be a wondrous pipe dream for most, but in Patton’s case he was “miserable,” according to biographer D’Este and Patton’s daughter Ruth Ellen. He loved Hawaiian life but he was frustrated by lack of promotion and the fact that he was now in his fifties without yet having discovered the end of the rainbow. He was drinking too much, Ruth Ellen noted—not more than usual, but too much “after a bad fall in polo [that] affected his drinking capacity for the rest of his life.” Not only that, he was angry about growing old, and he began seeking the company of younger people including “the eternal harpies who are always standing in the wings of successful marriages hoping the wife will falter and the man will be there for them to feast on.”5
Among these latter, unfortunately for everyone concerned, was twenty-one-year-old Jean Gordon, daughter of Beatrice’s half sister Louise, who came visiting from Boston on her way to a tour of Japan and the Far East. An educated, good-looking young woman, she “made a play” for Patton.6
Beatrice seemed unaware of the affair until her husband and niece returned from several unchaperoned days on another Hawaiian island. While Patton was there on official business, the affection between the two upon their homecoming was too apparent to ignore.
A “powerful tension” then descended upon the Patton family, lasting until Jean’s departure several days hence, when Beatrice turned to Ruth Ellen as Jean’s ship was pulling away from the pier—and as Patton was “making a damned fool of himself” waving furiously at Jean—and delivered herself of one of the sagest, bravest, most selfless and eloquent lectures in the history of marriage. “You know,” she told her daughter, “it’s lucky for us that I don’t have a mother because if I did I’d pack up and go to her now; and your father needs me. He doesn’t know it, but he needs me. In fact, right now he needs me more than I need him.”7
The infidelity had coincided with the publication of a novel—Blood of the Shark—that Beatrice had been putting the finishing touches on since their last posting in Hawaii in 1928. Such as it was, Patton’s behavior had also cruelly “stolen her moment,” as Beatrice explained to Ruth Ellen: “I want you to remember this; that even the best and truest men can be be-dazzled and make fools of themselves. So, if your husband ever does this to you, you can remember that I didn’t leave your father. I stuck with him because I am all that he really has, and I love him, and he loves me.”8
ABOARD THE FAR EAST LINER President Harding with Douglas MacArthur was Jean Faircloth, thirty-seven, a zesty, attractive, five-foot-two, green-eyed heiress from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, whose grandfather, a Confederate captain, had fought against Arthur MacArthur at the Battle of Missionary Ridge. She had planned to visit friends in Shanghai before concluding a world tour, but revised her itinerary to take a suite in the Manila Hotel, which was also Douglas MacArthur’s abode. The two had met at a cocktail party thrown by the ship’s captain and were inseparable thereafter.
MacArthur had brought his eighty-six-year-old mother, Pinky, on board the ship but she was ill and remained in her cabin. Once in Manila he installed her in the hotel’s penthouse suite next to his, but her condition worsened and within a month she was dead of cerebral thrombosis. It was an enormous blow to MacArthur, who had been extraordinarily close to her through the years—even to the extent that, when he was chief of staff, he would ride from his Washington office every day to Fort Myer to have lunch with her. He would carry her remains with him on his next trip to the States and bury her in the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.
MacArthur grieved for months, but Jean Faircloth was a decided help. The two of them would go to the movies five or six nights a week, arriving for the 8:30 showing at one of Manila’s many English-language theaters. Otherwise, MacArthur spent much of his time in the Philippines reading while sitting in his mahogany-paneled library in his six-room suite at the Manila. The library, like the rest of the suite, was palatial, with large maroon-colored leather chairs and an exquisite fifteen-foot Japanese bamboo table. In the spacious dining room, which featured a large Philippine mahogany table, MacArthur had his mother’s early American silver on prominent display.
There were two long tiled balconies that overlooked Manila Bay, one with a breathtaking view of “The Rock,” Corregidor, rising from the ocean, with the Bataan Peninsula as a backdrop. MacArthur would pace here for long periods, thinking. As biographer William Manchester tells it, pacing was MacArthur’s form of exercise. He was going on sixty years old and was reasonably fit except for a slightly protruding belly. According to Manchester, he paced for miles each day in his office and in his suite.
James Gavin, then a young officer and soon-to-be four-star general, remembered the day MacArthur came “visiting us at Fort McKinley on Luzon to watch some test firings of a new 81mm mortar. We were observing mortar fire from the high ground when he strode up in a rather imperious way. There was an aura about him that seemed to keep us junior officers at a distance. He was impressive and, in his own way, inspired great confidence and tremendous respect. We knew him by reputation to be a man of great physical courage, and by professional behavior to be a man of vision, intelligence, and great moral courage.”9
One of MacArthur’s first actions in building up Philippine defenses was the acquisition of fifty sixty-five-foot torpedo boats known as PT boats, based on a British-made model. Unfortunately, the British had to cancel most of the order when war with Germany was declared. (Thus, only nine PT boats were available when the Japanese finally attacked on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.)
MacArthur’s most important element of defense for the islands was a ten-year program to train 40,000 men a year as soldiers so that by the end of a decade he would have, at his disposal, a Philippine army of 400,000 divided into forty 10,000-man divisions scattered around the archipelago. Their training would be by a cadre of regular Philippine soldiers led by officers graduated from the country’s military academy that was modeled on West Point. “We are going to make it so very expensive for any nation to attack these islands that no nation will try i
t,” MacArthur told Collier’s magazine. He said it would cost the Japanese half a million men, three years, and a billion dollars to take the Philippines—a price they would not be willing to pay.10
They soon learned, however, that the principal enemy was lack of money. The United States, still suffering the Depression, would not appropriate nearly enough to fund such a force, and “the Philippine government simply could not afford to build real security from attack,” according to Dwight Eisenhower, who had come along to be MacArthur’s chief of staff (“My best clerk,” MacArthur called him).
As it turned out, the vaunted Philippine army that MacArthur was building wasn’t measuring up either. Armed with ancient World War I Enfield rifles and clad in sneakers and pith helmets, their training progressed in fits and starts and many of the locals evaded conscription because, among other things, the Filipino soldiers were paid only $7 a month compared with $30 for a U.S. private. Worse, Quezon, who was now president of the Philippine Commonwealth, had turned against his old friend and was threatening to abolish MacArthur’s ten-year plan, believing it might become a provocation to Japan.
Even with the setbacks, in the summer of 1937 the Philippine government made MacArthur a field marshal, the highest rank in its army. For the occasion, he had designed a uniform consisting of a white tunic, black pants, and a cap with the gold-braided “scrambled eggs” of a high-ranking field officer on the bill. Some historians have suggested that the uniform was ostentatious, or “Ruritanian,” but in fairness it closely resembled the U.S. Army’s regulation dress whites.
THAT SAME YEAR MACARTHUR MARRIED Jean Faircloth in a simple ceremony at New York’s city hall, following a disappointing visit to Washington, where the War Department turned down nearly all of his requests for military supplies, which were becoming increasingly urgent considering what was happening in Europe.
There, Hitler had seized absolute power and Germany was threatening her neighbors; Japan had invaded China. It was apparent to most knowledgeable observers that there would be no ten years’ time to prepare for an invasion. The Philippines stood squarely in the way of the Japanese path to the wealth of the East Indies, which contained the oil, tin, rubber, quinine, and other raw materials desperately needed by Imperial Nippon. Observers in the northernmost of the Philippine archipelago daily could see the aerial maneuvers of Japanese warplanes based on an island the Japanese occupied barely forty miles away. Time was running out for General MacArthur and his Philippine army.
UPON HIS ARRIVAL AT VANCOUVER BARRACKS, Marshall wrote to General Keehn in Chicago, telling him of the historic nature of his new post. His quarters, for instance, had been occupied at one time or another by a “succession of Civil War celebrities or Indian fighters,” including Generals Nelson Miles, Edward R. Canby, George Crook, John Gibbon, and John Pope. The parade ground, in the shadow of Mount Hood, was surrounded by giant fir trees and bordered the Columbia River, which “emerges from its famous gorge a few miles above the post.” There was excellent salmon fishing and pheasant hunting in the vicinity, as well as skiing on Mount Hood.11
In addition to his duties with the Fifth Brigade, Marshall also had thirty-five CCC camps scattered throughout Oregon and southern Washington. At one point, in June of 1937, he gained the national spotlight when a Russian plane intending to fly nonstop from Moscow to San Francisco was forced to put down in Vancouver. There was a great press clamor to interview the crew but Marshall declared that no interviews would be conducted until the Soviet pilots got some sleep. After lending the Russians his own sets of pajamas, Marshall then offered a fancy breakfast table for the fliers and invited the reporters in; as well, he brought the Russian ambassador, who had been awaiting the flight in San Francisco, up to Vancouver and gave him a presentation sword to honor the occasion, which elicited a “warm thanks” from the ambassador.
All of this was duly noted by the State Department, the American public, and the General Staff of the Army back in the capital. Marshall’s earliest biographer, William Frye, notes that there was “strong evidence,” but “no clear proof,” that it was at about this point in Marshall’s career that decisions had been made to bring him to Washington, D.C., as the successor to the chief of staff. If that were so, Marshall certainly had no idea of it, but he continued to distinguish himself as commander of the Fifth Brigade and overseer of the CCC camps.
BY 1937 THE DEMOCRACIES RECOILED as Adolf Hitler firmly ensconced himself and his Nazi party as brutal regulators of German society. It was one of several dictatorships that ultimately sought to divide and control large parts of the world.
Following World War I, the victorious Allies had set up an organization they hoped would prevent future conflicts. Called the League of Nations, it was envisioned as a body that would not only mediate international disputes but settle them, if necessary, by force of arms. Almost immediately things began to go wrong. Principally isolationist sentiment in the United States caused the U.S. Senate to reject the idea of a “world government,” and thus the most powerful nation on earth at the time would not lend its considerable teeth to a multinational plan for stopping wars before they got out of hand.
Throughout the 1920s and ’30s American military might was dismantled in favor of domestic programs, the more so following the onset of the Great Depression. During this period American leftists, socialists, pacifists, and isolationists loudly denounced munitions makers and financiers such as J. P. Morgan for being responsible for all the misery caused by the recent war, and most American citizens assumed the attitude that “Europe’s problems were Europe’s problems.”12 This outlook was so pervasive that a measure known as the Kellogg-Briand peace pact was passed by the U.S. Congress, Britain, France, and other nations—including Germany, which actually outlawed war, and contained about as much authority as outlawing thunderstorms.
All of this played greatly into Hitler’s and the other dictators’ hands: decadent, idealistic, foolish democracies, thinking they could vote out war. Hitler made his first move in 1936, marching into the Rhineland, which had been set up as a buffer zone between Germany and France, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Neither the French nor the British did anything but protest to the League of Nations, which also did nothing. Hitler made numerous sham speeches intended for international consumption in which he stated, “We have no territorial intentions in Europe … Germany will never break the peace,” and similar words to that effect.
Next the Nazis marched into Austria, claiming it had always been a Germanic province. The Western Allies merely watched. It was a continuing pattern of Hitler’s: claiming he desired no territory but then seizing it. Soon it became Czechoslovakia’s turn, on the pretext that there were German citizens living among the Czechs in an area known as the Sudetenland who wished to return to the fatherland. By then France and Britain were thoroughly alarmed. A permanent peace was sought by sending the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, to meet Hitler in Munich and draw up some binding accord. It was a fiasco. When the tall, umbrella-carrying, bowler-hatted Chamberlain returned to London he waved a Hitler-signed document and proclaimed, “This means peace in our time.”
It meant no such thing. Among the leaders of Great Britain only Winston Churchill fully understood the machinations of Hitler. “The government had to choose between shame and war,” he thundered. “They have chosen shame, and now they will get war.” Barely six months later, in March 1939, German storm troopers annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia, including its large armaments factories at Skoda and elsewhere.
In August 1939 Hitler negotiated one of the most breathtaking diplomatic coups in history—a ten-year “nonaggression” treaty with the Soviet Union, thus making an ally out of his most powerful archenemy. This shocking news completely flummoxed Western Communists and their fellow travelers, who for years had been warned of the dangers of fascism. Now the Communist Daily Worker began preaching that Hitler and the Nazis were their friends.
Meanwhile, across the Paci
fic, the Empire of Japan had for a long time been flexing its muscles. In 1853 the American commodore Matthew C. Perry had steamed his squadron of sleek, black-hulled warships into Tokyo Bay, opening relations with the island kingdom of Japan, which had been the most remote civilized nation on earth.
Some months later Perry returned with a full U.S. fleet bearing champagne, modern tools, women’s clothing, a telegraph, guns, pictures of New York City, and an English-language dictionary and sailed “triumphantly home having brought a mighty empire into the family of nations without bloodshed.”13
Perry’s feat set off a chain of events, which, fifty years into the future, changed the world, as Japan incorporated Western science, culture, and military technology into its burgeoning economic system. The Japanese began purchasing large warships from the British, whose naval officers trained Japanese sailors, just as German officers were hired to train its army. In 1894 Japan set out to become an imperial power by invading Korea as well as Manchuria and the great Chinese island of Formosa.
This alarmed the Russians, who ran the Japanese out of Manchuria and took it for themselves. But the Japanese were not done. In a chilling parallel to the Pearl Harbor raid in 1941, Japan in 1904 launched a sneak torpedo attack at Port Arthur that annihilated Russia’s Oriental Fleet, including two of the czar’s largest battleships, only afterward bothering to declare war. Land fighting continued, with the Japanese getting the better of it, inflicting a hundred thousand casualties on the Russians at the Battle of Mukden.