American Caesar

  And yet. . . .

  Despite its unparalleled horror—the insanities of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam never quite matched the madness of World War I—there will always be overtones of doomed romance in the appalling events of 1914–1918. Even in its hideous death rattle the nineteenth century retained a certain runic quality. It comes through most clearly in the popular music of those desperate years. No other war has inspired such poignant melodies. The very titles are evocative: “Tipperary,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” “There’s a Long, Long Trail,” “Over There,” “Pack Up Your Troubles,” “Till We Meet Again.” After it was all over, in 1919, a colonel who hadn’t been overseas wrote of MacArthur that it was “hard for me to conceive of this sensitive, high-strung personage slogging in the mud, enduring filth, living in stinking clothing and crawling over jagged soil under criss-crosses of barbed wire to have a bloody clash with a bestial enemy.” The explanation was that men like MacArthur, raised to believe in Victorian heroism, invested even the nightmare of trench warfare with extravagant chimeras of fantastic glory.2

  After the Germans’ failure to take Verdun, France had become a relatively quiet front for the kaiser’s assault troops. Their communiques customarily reported that all was quiet on the western front. Elsewhere there was plenty of news, however, nearly all of it good for them. Blessed with interior lines, they needed no risky amphibious operations, England’s undoing at the Dardanelles. They could strike anywhere by rescheduling a few trains, and as the deadlock continued in the west they had crushed a weak eastern ally each autumn, thus releasing more of their troops for France.

  In 1914 they had mauled the Russians in East Prussia. In 1915 Bulgaria had joined them to knock Serbia out of the war. In 1916 Rumania, encouraged by temporary Russian gains and hungry for land, threw in its lot with the Allies, with fiasco as the result. Rumania had doubled its army during the preceding two years, but strategically it was isolated, and its officer corps strolled the streets of Bucharest, wearing rouge and propositioning boys while spies blew up a dump of nine million shells outside the city and a dozen enemy divisions, drawn from the western front, swarmed up the Carpathian Mountains. Just before winter sealed the passes the Germans broke through and Rumania quit.

  The Middle East was the same story—only the camel-mounted raiding parties of a young English archaeologist named T. E. Lawrence offered a ghost of hope—and in 1917, with a succession of revolutionary governments staggering leftward in Russia, Germany sent a phalanx of picked divisions to reinforce Austria’s Caporetto sector in Italy. On October 24 they attacked out of the Julian Alps in a thick fog. In twelve hours the defenders were on the run; by November terrified Venetians were hiding the bronze horses of Saint Mark’s and preparing to flee. When the Italians finally rallied they had lost 600,000 men and were back on the Piave.

  Nor was that the worst. In France 1917 had been a freak of terror. Both the French and the British had felt confident in the spring. Each had planned independently to make this the year of the decisive battle in the west, and each had massed its biggest battalions for a breakthrough. The French were to open with an “unlimited offensive” under their swashbuckling new constable, Robert Georges Nivelle, who had replaced the bovine Joseph Jacques Joffre. Even the English generals liked Nivelle, and Allied capitals thrilled to his battle cry, “One and a half million Frenchmen cannot fail.”

  Unfortunately the excitement, the cry, and even the plan of attack had reached the kaiser’s military leaders, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. The offensive had been predicted in French newspapers and orders circulated as low as company level, which meant the Germans picked up prisoners carrying them. Nivelle knew this. He also knew that Ludendorff was riposting with a strategic withdrawal, fouling wells and sowing booby traps as he went. That didn’t change a thing, Nivelle insisted. In fact, it ruined everything. The new Hindenburg Line was a defender’s dream. It turned Nivelle’s drive into a welter of slaughter. He made no real gains, and the moment he stopped, revolt spread among the French troops. At the height of their mutiny fourteen out of sixteen divisions were disabled. France had been virtually knocked out of the war. The French had lost nearly a million men in the retreat of 1914 and now, with these new losses, didn’t have the manpower to build a fresh striking force. The survivors huddled sullenly in the trenches, and to anoint their wounds the government named a tranquil new maréchal, Henri Philippe Pétain.

  Now the Allies turned desperately to Britain’s Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. He responded by giving them the agony of Flanders. Attacking from Ypres, the Tommies leaped toward the German submarine ports in Belgium. They never had a chance. There wasn’t a flicker of surprise. A long preliminary bombardment merely destroyed the Flemish drainage system. The water, having nowhere else to go, flooded the trenches, and to make things soggier the rains were among the heaviest in thirty years. After three months in this dismal sinkhole Haig had barely taken the village of Passchendaele. His army was exhausted. In London the ambulance trains unloaded at night, smuggling casualties home out of consideration for civilian morale, and in Flanders fields the poppies blew between the crosses, row on row, that marked 150,000 new British graves. “Our only hope lies in American reserves,” said Sir William Robertson, chief of Britain’s Imperial General Staff, and Pétain said, “I shall wait for the Americans and the tanks.”

  The United States had more or less stumbled into this catastrophe when the kaiser, resolving to deprive England of food and supplies, had declared unrestricted submarine warfare on neutral shipping. His naval advisers had assured him that this was a safe gamble, that the British would starve before American troops could reach France in force. How nearly right they were was revealed to U.S. Admiral William S. Sims, who, after Congress had formally declared war on Germany, sailed over to assess the Allied situation. In London Britain’s Sir John Jellicoe told him that the U-boat campaign had England on her knees. Rations were tight and growing tighter. The British government was doing all it could—draft notices were being sent to the maimed, the blind, the mad, and in some cases even the dead—but it wasn’t enough. One freighter in four was going down. There was six weeks’ supply of grain in the country. Jellicoe expected an Allied surrender by November 1. Meanwhile, in Paris, French generals were telling Pershing that they had reached the end of their string.3

  Ultimately the British Admiralty discovered that convoys could cope with submarines, and by midsummer of 1918 camouflaged transports would be ferrying 300,000 doughboys a month across the Atlantic, but on October 19, 1917, when Colonel Douglas MacArthur sailed from Hoboken aboard the Covington with elements of the 42nd Division, he could by no means be sure that he would ever see land again. In fact the transport ran aground forty miles from the port of Saint-Nazaire, where U-boats were prowling, and she was sunk on her return voyage, but by then MacArthur had led his troops ashore in a thin cold rain. Although technically the Rainbow’s chief of staff, he was actually in temporary command; Mann was ill, old, and bedridden. On December 19 Pershing appointed Major General Charles T. Menoher, one of his West Point classmates, as the new commander of the division. From MacArthur’s point of view, the appointment was ideal. Menoher became one of his young chief of staffs warmest admirers, gave him his head, and shared his love of the Rainbow.

  MacArthur’s loyalty to the 42nd had already been tested. In November, while his troops were erecting tents east of Nancy, thirty-three of the division’s best officers were ordered to other units. MacArthur appeared in Chaumont, Pershing’s headquarters, to protest, but his objections were ignored, and he had scarcely returned to camp when, on November 20, he was informed that Chaumont brass had decided to use the 42nd’s men as replacements for other divisions. Censorship not yet having been imposed, MacArthur sent anguished cables to Washington, and presently influential senators and congressmen from states represented in the Rainbow were demanding that the division be kept intact. Then MacArthur revisited Chaumont and urged his old frie
nd James G. Harbord, now a brigadier and Pershing’s chief of staff, to intervene. Harbord did, and eventually Pershing yielded, designating another division as a replacement source. In his memoirs MacArthur concedes that his politicking “was probably not in strict accord with normal procedure and it created resentment against me among certain members of Pershing’s staff.” This was true, it is understandable, and it was important. As subsequent events were to prove, a coterie of officers hostile to MacArthur had already begun to form at Chaumont. Ever sensitive to slights, he lumped them together with the awards board which had rejected his candidacy for the Medal of Honor. There were, he came to believe, people in the army out to get him—deskbound men who envied and resented a fighting officer. This was the beginning of his paranoia, which was to bring so much anguish to him and to others in the years ahead. It is worth noting that Chaumont’s brightest young colonel was George C. Marshall. In France the antagonism between the two men would grow, with grave consequences for the country both served so well in other ways.4

  In the Rainbow, however, MacArthur was among friends. The thirty-three officers who had been transferred out included several of his admirers—one was Brigadier General Charles P. Summerall, like Pershing and MacArthur a West Point first captain, and like Pershing a former subordinate of Arthur MacArthur—but many remained, notably Colonel Robert Wood and Major William N. Hughes, Jr., the army brat who had been a boyhood playmate of the MacArthur brothers at Fort Selden. And every day the 42nd’s dashing chief of staff was forming new friendships he would cherish in the quiet years between the Armistice and Pearl Harbor. Their names read like a roll of the war’s celebrities. “Wild Bill” Donovan of New York fought under him. (So, briefly, did an artillery captain from Missouri named Harry S. Truman.) Elsie Janis sang to him. Eddie Rickenbacker told him jokes. Father Francis P. Duffy prayed for him. Baron Manfred von Richthofen’s squadron tried to strafe him, coming so close that MacArthur, a hundred yards below, recognized the pilots’ flowing yellow scarves. And when MacArthur removed the wire grommet from his barracks cap to give it a more rakish appearance, Billy Mitchell copied him—thus setting the style for the American fliers of World War II.5

  Difficult though it may be for Pacific veterans to credit, MacArthur’s soldiers of 1918 idolized him. He was closer to their age than other senior officers, encouraged them to call him “Buddy,” shared their discomforts and their danger, and adored them in return. Addressing a Rainbow reunion seventeen years after the Armistice, he said: “The enduring fortitude, the patriotic self-abnegation, and the unsurpassed military genius of the American soldier of the World War will stand forth in undimmed luster; in his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give. He needs no eulogy from me or from any other man; he had written his own history, and written it in red on his enemy’s breast, but when I think of his patience in adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion I cannot express.” And he said: “My thoughts go back to those men who went with us to their last charge. In memory’s eye I can see them now—forming grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain of the foxhole, driving home to their objective, and to the judgment seat of God. I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death.”6

  One of the regiments under his command was the 168th U.S. Infantry, which, as the 51st Iowa Infantry, had been led by Arthur MacArthur in the Philippines. When a French staff major congratulated Douglas MacArthur on the military bearing of the men, he replied, within earshot of the troops, “Is it any wonder that my father was proud of this regiment?” Minutes after the formation had broken up, every soldier who had been in it knew what he had said, and his reputation acquired a new dimension. Similarly, he praised his Alabamans, Ohioans, and New Yorkers—the 165th U.S. Infantry, the old “Fighting 69th.” He became so popular, in fact, that some doughboys were prepared to credit him with every propitious omen that greeted the 42nd, including two spectacular rainbows, one which arched across the sky when they left the Baccarat sector after four months of intensive training in trench warfare and another which appeared when they attacked on the Ourcq River. George Kenney tells the story of one of MacArthur’s West Point classmates who was trying to find him. He asked men wearing the red, yellow, and blue patch of the Rainbow if they knew their chief of staff when they saw him. One of them answered indignantly that “every soldier in the 42nd Division” knew MacArthur.7

  Whipping the Rainbow into shape in the countryside around Pershing’s headquarters, MacArthur was told that veteran French officers would be seconded to him as instructors during that last bitter winter of the war. “Though it is to be borne in mind that our methods are to be distinctly our own, it would be manifestly unwise not to be guided by their long practical and recent experience in trench warfare,” MacArthur instructed his staff, and he received the Frenchmen with deference. He was less receptive to admonitions from his countrymen in the American Expeditionary Force’s GHQ. On December 26 the division began a three-day forced march from Rimaucourt to Rolampont, passing through Chaumont, where officers of the AEF inspector general’s staff watched narrowly. Since a blizzard was falling and many of the men lacked adequate footwear, they left bloodstains on the snow. The inspectors noted this unmilitary display in a crisp memorandum to MacArthur. He was exasperated by that, and even more annoyed when, seven weeks later, another team of inspectors arrived in Rolampont to determine whether or not the Rainbow was ready for the trenches and submitted a savage report, critical of minutiae. As it happened, their officious quibbling was inconsequential. Everyone knew the Germans were planning to launch a spring offensive with troops freed by the Russian armistice. American units were desperately needed, and Pershing ordered the 42nd into the Luneville sector on the Lorraine plain for a final month of training at the front.8

  This was a time of heavy paperwork for Colonel MacArthur. According to Captain Walter B. Wolf, his aide at the time, the colonel toiled “very early in the morning on his field plans. Alone, he made notes on a card, and by the time we met for a staff discussion he had the plans all worked out. He asked for our opinions but, more often than not, we all concurred with his. His plans invariably covered the optimum situation as well as the minimum. He was meticulous in organization and consummate in planning.” More and more he was delegating authority for operations, intelligence, and administration to majors and lieutenant colonels. There was a kind of madness in his method: he wanted the staff to be self-sufficient so that he would be free to cross no-man’s-land with assault troops.9

  His first chance came on February 26, 1918. French troops were planning a night raid on the German lines. MacArthur asked General Georges de Bazelaire for permission to accompany the party, and when de Bazelaire demurred the colonel argued: “I cannot fight them if I cannot see them.” The general bowed to this logic, though he might have been less amenable if he had seen MacArthur preparing to go over the top that evening. He could hardly be said to have dressed for the occasion. He wore his smashed-down cap instead of a steel helmet, and the rest of his outfit was outlandish by standards of the western front: a four-foot muffler knitted by his mother, a turtleneck sweater, immaculate riding breeches, and cavalry boots with a mirror finish. From his mouth a cigarette holder jutted at a jaunty angle. His only weapon was a riding crop. To Captain Thomas T. Handy, one of Menoher’s aides, he said: “Yes, I’m going along on the picnic, too.” Handy volunteered to join him. Neither mentioned the plan to General Menoher, who had assembled his brigade commanders on a little ridge to watch the launching of the raid. Remembering his father, MacArthur had said to an officer who inquired about his unorthodox attire, “It’s the orders you disobey that make you famous,” but there was no point in courting disapproval. It seemed wiser to present the Rainbow’s commander with a fait accompli.10

  Colonel MacArthur with Major General Charles T. Menoher in France

  Co
lonel MacArthur with General Georges de Bazelaire in France

  Poilus were daubing sticky black mud on their faces. MacArthur and Handy followed their example, accepted the loan of wire cutters and trench knives from a French lieutenant, and crawled over the parapet with the rest of the party. Flares burst overhead, revealing a Journey’s End scene: twisted barbwire strung between weirdly bent poles, shell holes thick with mud, crouched figures advancing stealthily into the wind, one, now, with a muffler streaming behind him like a banner. Menoher said later of his two truants, “I saw them as they were taking a sneak around the point of a hill but said nothing, and we did not see them again until next morning.”

  The signal for the raiders’ attack was to be a hand grenade hurled by a poilu. As it burst, MacArthur later wrote, a German outpost’s “gun flashed in the night. The alarm spread through the trench, across the front. Flares soared and machine guns rattled. Enemy artillery lay down a barrage, . . . trapping the party. But the raid went on . . . . The fight was savage and merciless.” At daybreak the party returned with a large bag of prisoners, one of them a German colonel being prodded by MacArthur with the riding crop. Behind him, on the wire, the 42nd’s chief of staff had left the seat of his breeches. Frenchmen, in his words, “crowded around me, shaking my hand, slapping me on the back, and offering me cognac and absinthe.” General de Bazelaire pinned a Croix de Guerre on him and kissed him on both cheeks. Menoher, awarding him the Silver Star afterward, told a New York Times war correspondent: “Colonel MacArthur is one of the ablest officers in the United States Army and one of the most popular.”11