MacArthur, meanwhile, had been winning his sixth Silver Star. The Rainbow hadn’t been one of the assault divisions; Menoher had been instructed “to support the attack of the First Army west of the Meuse by joining in the artillery bombardment and by making deep raids at the hour of attack.” The 84th’s brigadier staged a complex double raid against a fortified farm and a village of stone buildings. He led it, suffered fewer than twenty casualties, and was cited on his return. Then, on the last night in September, the Rainbow moved into the hell of the Meuse-Argonne and debarked in the Montfaucon Woods. The forest was cloaked and soaked in blinding fog. One Rainbow officer described the scene: “Literally every inch of ground had been torn by shells. Craters fifteen feet deep and as wide across, yawned on all sides. All around was a dreary waste of woods, once thick with stately trees and luxuriant undergrowth, but now a mere graveyard of broken limbs and splintered stumps.” Such was the arena for what was becoming the AEF’s Calvary.
Relieving the battered 1st Division, the 42nd took over a three-mile front, with the 84th Brigade entrenched in a thick forest on the right. From his headquarters in a Neuve-Forge farmhouse two miles behind the trenches, MacArthur studied two fortified knolls in the Kriemhilde Stellung: Hill 288 and the Côte-de-Châtillon. Twice it seemed unlikely that he would live to see either attacked. German artillery was plastering the American positions. On the night of October 11, and again the following day, he encountered mustard and tear gas. Paying the penalty for his failure to carry a mask, he was so sick that his adjutant recommended that he be evacuated. But he refused hospitalization. The next night General Summerall, visiting the farmhouse, said to him: “Give me Châtillon, or a list of five thousand casualties.” MacArthur replied, “If this brigade does not capture Châtillon you can publish a casualty list of the entire brigade with the brigade commander’s name at the top. ‘ Too moved to speak, Summerall left without another word.41
Brigadier General MacArthur near the end of World War I
But the challenge required more than bravado, and MacArthur knew it. Earlier Menoher had asked him if the 84th could take Châtillon, and “I told him as long as we were speaking in the strictest confidence that I was not certain.” On the dark, wet morning of Monday, October 14, 1918, both brigades of the Rainbow advanced in a single wave against the heights of the Hindenburg Line. The 84th wrested the crest of Hill 288 from two thousand Germans, but Châtillon was another matter. Early in the afternoon MacArthur scrawled a message to Menoher: “The following situation on my front at 2 P.M. . . . All along my right as I go forward I have to establish a line of defense against heavy German fire, artillery, machine gun, and infantry . . . . I am therefore, due to my exposed right flank, covering an actual front of about four kilometers. Along the Châtillon de Châtillon [sic], the enemy’s position is reported by the 167th Infantry to be of great strength. . . . It is impossible, in my opinion, to take this position without a careful artillery preparation.” Doughboys held a tenuous foothold on Châtillon’s southern slope; no more.42
The next day was worse. A savage Boche counterattack drove back troops of the 83rd Brigade, and that evening Summerall relieved the 83rd’s commander. Then he phoned MacArthur, telling him that “the Côte de Châtillon is the key to the entire situation, and I want it taken by six o’clock tomorrow evening.” Again MacArthur assured him that he would reach the objective “or report a casualty list of 6,000 dead. That will include me.” In the morning the 83rd was again pinned down, but MacArthur enveloped the hill, mounting a frontal assault and, simultaneously, sending a battalion led by Major Lloyd Ross around it, snaking from bole to bole, cleaning out ravines and machine-gun nests. It was a bloody business. In MacArthur’s words: “Officers fell and sergeants leaped to the command. Companies dwindled to platoons and corporals took over. At the end, Major Ross had only 300 men and 6 officers left out of 1,450 men and 25 officers. That is the way the Châtillon-de-Châtillon fell.”43
At last the Americans had pierced the Kriemhilde Stellung. Pershing called it “a decisive blow” and said, “The importance of these operations can hardly be overestimated.” Doughboys now flanked the German line on the Aisne and the heights of the Meuse. MacArthur, calling the battle “the approach to final victory,” said: “We broke through a prepared German line of defense of such importance to them that their retreat to the other side of the Meuse River was already forecast. “ Summerall recommended that he be promoted to major general and awarded the Medal of Honor. He did receive a second Distinguished Service Cross for the manner in which he “personally led his men,” displaying “indomitable resolution and great courage in rallying broken lines and reforming attacks, thereby making victory possible. “ The citation concluded: On a field where courage was the rule, his courage was the dominant factor.” For the rest of his days, he would be unable to speak of the Châtillon-de-Châtillon without visible emotion.44
Correspondents and officers from other units have left memorable impressions of MacArthur at this juncture. Floyd Gibbons said of his cap’s rakish slant that “the tilt permits his personality to emerge without violating army regulations.” Of course, all of his habiliments, from the muffler to the riding crop, were flagrant violations of regulations; he knew it and justified it on the ground that “senior officers were permitted to use their own judgment about such matters of personal detail.” “Who’s that?” Lieutenant George Kenney asked of an infantry captain as the brigadier swaggered by. “That’s Douglas MacArthur,” the captain replied. “He commands the 84th Brigade of the Rainbow Division, and if he doesn’t get himself knocked off. . . that guy is going places. His outfit swears by him and he’s O.K., but he seems to think he’s going to live forever. He never wears a tin hat like everyone else up here. He wears that same cap on a trench raid—and he goes on raids carrying a riding crop, too. He’s already collected a couple of wound stripes, besides a flock of medals he earned the hard way.”45
The walls of his downstairs office in the farmhouse were covered with maps, on which his adjutant moved pins of various colors. Upstairs the brigadier slept in a typical French built-in bed. In the center of the bedroom was a metal wood-burning stove, which glowed red on chilly nights. The floor was of rough planking. Across from the bed stood a wooden table with three chairs; light filtered in through two dirty windows. This was the scene of a divisional council of war in late October. Menoher, presiding, asked his two brigade commanders whether they thought the Rainbow, which had lost four thousand men in penetrating the Hindenburg Line, would be fit to play a role when the American advance resumed on November 1. The 83rd’s brigadier thought so; so did the 84th’s. According to the divisional history, “MacArthur jumped from his chair and started walking up and down, as he always does when talking about something in which he is greatly interested. In his brilliant way he soon showed that there was no phase of the matter which he had not thoroughly considered from every possible point of view. His discussion was such a comprehensive and complete analysis that his two auditors regretted then and afterwards that there was no stenographer present to take it down and preserve it.”46
Pershing, unimpressed, sent the understrength 42nd into corps reserve, where Menoher wrote him a two-thousand-word letter, mostly about MacArthur. To his old classmate the Rainbow’s commander said that the 84th’s brigadier had “actually commanded larger bodies of troops . . . than any other officer in our army, with, in each instance, conspicuous success.” He praised this “brilliant and gifted officer who has, after more than a year’s full service in France without a day apart from his division or his command, and although twice wounded in action, filled each day with a loyal and intelligent application to duty such as is, among officers in the field and in actual contact with battle, without parallel in our army.” Menoher sent a copy to Pinky.47
Abruptly the weather cleared. The trees were revealed in their autumnal splendor—coppery, golden, purplish, deep scarlet. When Pershing renewed his drive, the enemy’s last scribbl
y ditches caved in, and four days later the kaiser’s troops had no front at all. Apart from the stolid machine gunners, who kept their murderous barrels hot to the end, German soldiers had become a disorderly mob of refugees. They had lost heart; reports from the fatherland were appalling. Ludendorff had been sacked, there was revolution in the streets, the fleet had mutinied when ordered off on a death-or-glory ride against the British.
In this final agony, the Boche rear guard in France, Sergeant Alexander Woollcott wrote in Stars and Stripes, resembled an escaping man who “twitches a chair down behind him for pursuers to stumble over.” Each chill dawn doughboys roared over the top in fighting kit, driving the fleeing wraiths in feldgrau away from their railroad and up against the hills of Belgium and Luxembourg. It was a chase, not a battle. The galloping horses and bouncing caissons could scarcely keep up with the troops. The Rainbow joined this race on the night of November 4, when it relieved the 78th Division twelve miles south of Sedan. What followed was the greatest American military controversy of World War I—the only controversy during MacArthur’s career in which he was held blameless by all parties.
Everybody wanted to take Sedan. Militarily it was insignificant, but its historical associations invested it with glamour, and Pershing was determined to reach it before the French, who were advancing on his left. On the afternoon of Tuesday, November 5, he made his wishes known to his operations officer, Brigadier Fox Conner. Conner, Hugh Drum, and George Marshall then drafted instructions to two corps commanders, instructing them that “General Pershing desires that the honor of entering Sedan should fall to the American First Army. . . . Your attention is invited to favorable opportunity now existing for pressing our advance through the night. Boundaries will not be considered binding.”48
This last sentence was mischievous, and it “precipitated,” as MacArthur observed, “what narrowly missed being one of the great tragedies of American history.” Sedan lay three miles ahead in the Rainbow’s path; barring a die-hard German defense along the Meuse, MacArthur could expect to enter it in twenty-four hours. When the Pershing-Conner-Drum-Marshall instruction was telephoned to Summerall at 7:00 P.M. that Tuesday, however, he told the brigadier commanding the 1st Division “to march immediately on Sedan with mission to cooperate and capture that town.” Meanwhile Menoher was being told by the other corps commander that “the pursuit must be kept up day and night without halting,” and that “Sedan must be reached and taken tonight, even if the last man and officer drops in his tracks.” The 1st and 42nd divisions, in short, were on a collision course.49
MacArthur, though unaware that U.S. troops were about to attack across his front, had grave doubts about the wisdom of a Rainbow advance before dawn. He was already on the precipices overlooking the Meuse, and he suggested delay on the ground that a morning thrust “over unfamiliar and rough ground gave greater promise of success than one made at night.” Menoher agreed. The young brigadier had retired to his built-in bed when word reached him that strange troops were swarming over the Rainbow’s bivouacs. The threat of shots being exchanged by the two units was very real. Rising, MacArthur later said, he “proceeded within the front of the brigade in order to prevent personally any of these occurrences.” Here his bizarre raiment was almost his undoing. A 16th Infantry patrol led by a Lieutenant Black, coming upon an officer leaning over a map and wearing a floppy hat, muffler, riding breeches, and polished boots, assumed that he must be a German. They took him prisoner at pistol point. He was quickly released with apologies, but it had been a near thing. The 1st Division withdrew in confusion from the 42nd’s sector. The recriminations lasted much longer, however. Though MacArthur himself treated the incident as a joke, his troops might have captured Sedan in the morning. As it was, they were relieved in the general muddle. MacArthur was awarded his seventh Silver Star for gallantry in the capture of the Meuse heights. It was his last decoration of the war; the Armistice found the Rainbow in corps reserve.50
There MacArthur’s paranoia erupted when he learned that an officer from Chaumont was hanging around divisional headquarters, asking the staff what they thought of their leader. Coming on top of the farce of his capture—which Pershing and his subordinates were frantically covering up—the visit was interpreted by him to mean that they were out to get him on the ground “that I failed to follow certain regulations prescribed for our troops, that I wore no helmet, that I carried no gas mask, that I went unarmed, that I always had a riding crop in my hand, that I declined to command from the rear.” Actually GHQ had no intention of reprimanding him. On the contrary: Menoher was being promoted to corps commander, and MacArthur was designated his successor. Aged thirty-eight, he was the leader of twenty-six thousand men—the youngest divisional commander of the war. At the same time, Pershing wrote him that “it gives me great pleasure to inform you that on Oct. 17, I recommended you for promotion to the grade of Major General, basing my recommendation upon the efficiency of your service with the American Expeditionary Force.”51
The Armistice froze all promotions, denying MacArthur his second star, but he continued to lead the Rainbow until November 22, when a new two-star general relieved him. (MacArthur advised Chaumont that he was again taking over the 84th on the ground that “the 84th brigade is General MacArthur’s old brigade which he has commanded for many months in active operations.” This was one of his first references to himself in the third person. Later this Caesarean mannerism became habitual.) D. Clayton James, the distinguished historian, has suggested that the divisional command had been temporarily awarded to him “in order to keep him quiet after the Sedan affair. “ Perhaps, but he had certainly earned it; in addition to twelve decorations from his own government—including two Purple Hearts and the Distinguished Service Medal, which he won for his performance as the 42nd’s chief of staff— he had received nineteen honors from Allied nations. It wasn’t enough for him, of course; he would never have enough. When an awards board decided in January that he was ineligible for the Medal of Honor, he blamed the decision on “emnity” against him “on the part of certain senior members of Pershing’s GHQ staff.”52
Relinquishing control of the 42nd as it crossed into Luxembourg on its way to occupation of the defeated Reich, MacArthur entered Germany at the head of the 84th Brigade on December 1, 1918. It had been a 155-mile march over shell-scarred roads, and he observed suspiciously that natty officers from Chaumont’s inspector general’s office had been stationed along the way, looking stonily at the slogging infantrymen and making mysterious entries in their little notebooks. Actually the unwelcome observers had noted that the 84th appeared to be “very good and the march discipline excellent,” but the brigadier was unmollified. He was convinced that they were there to harass him.53
In the Rhineland MacArthur occupied a magnificent castle in the town of Sinzig, about twenty-five miles south of Bonn. It was an odd time for him. During the Rainbow’s four months of occupation duty he was ill twice, first from a throat infection—“too much gas during the campaign”—and then with diphtheria. Moreover, he was concerned about poor morale among his troops, who were homesick and eager to leave Europe now that the war was over. Yet he admired Sinzig, “a beautiful spot filled with the lore and romance of centuries,” was impressed by the “warm hospitality of the population, their well-ordered way of life, their thrift and geniality,” and clearly enjoyed entertaining distinguished visitors.
The most illustrious of these was the Prince of Wales, who was pessimistic about the inevitability of a German revanchist movement. MacArthur cheerfully assured him, “We beat the Germans this time, and we can do it again.” William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette lunched at the château and was intrigued by his host. In his autobiography he wrote: “I had never before met so vivid, so captivating, so magnetic a man. He was all that Barrymore and John Drew hoped to be. And how he could talk!” White described his “eyes with a ‘come hither’ in them that must have played the devil with the girls,” noted that “his staff ado
red him, his men worshiped him,” described him as wearing “a ragged brown sweater and civilian pants—nothing more,” reported that he “was greatly against the order prohibiting fraternization,” and said MacArthur “thought Baker and Wood would be the presidential nominees and . . . was greatly interested in the radical movement in America.”54
A third, perceptive guest was Joseph C. Chase, a portrait artist who was traveling around the Rhineland sketching Americans who had distinguished themselves in France. In the April 1919 issue of the World’s Work he wrote that he had “painted General MacArthur by candlelight, in one of the most interesting country houses in Germany; a house built upon the foundations of an old nunnery where Charlemagne had lived for a time with one of his wives, and where he abandoned her.” Chase observed: “Young MacArthur looks like the typical hero of historical romance; he could easily have stepped out of the pages of the ‘Prisoner of Zenda,’ or ‘Rupert of Hentzau.’ He looked as though he were under thirty years of age . . . he is lean, light-skinned, with long, well-kept fingers, and is always carefully groomed. . . . He is a thorough going brainy young man, distinctly of the city type, a good talker and a good listener, perfectly ‘daffy’ about the. 42nd Division, and, of course, positive that the 42nd Division won the Great War. He is quick in his movements, physical and mental, and is subject to changing moods; he knits his brows or laughs heartily with equal facility, and often during the same sentence.”55