The last thing MacArthur needed as the Pacific war approached was turmoil in his staff, but he had to bear that cross, too. Eisenhower had been crouched beside his radio in the Manila Hotel on September 1, 1939, when the Wehrmacht lunged toward Warsaw. He immediately rode up to the penthouse and told MacArthur: “General, in my opinion the United States cannot remain out of this war for long. I want to go home as soon as possible. I want to participate in the preparatory work that I’m sure is going to be intense.” Ike later recalled, “MacArthur said I was making a big mistake, [that] the work I was doing in the Philippines was far more important than any I could do as a mere lieutenant colonel in the American Army.”* As chief of staff in Manila Eisenhower had been the officer closest to the General, but MacArthur accepted Ike’s decision gracefully. He and Jean came down to the dock for a farewell party in the Eisenhowers’ stateroom, staying until the steward called “all ashore,” and as the boat pulled away they stood on the pier waving. Mamie was pleased. She could remember the MacArthur’ appearing for an officer’s departure only once before.52
During these last years of peace MacArthur was assembling a coterie as tightly knit as the Chaumont clique had been in World War I. Sidney Huff, in 1935, had been the first to join him; in 1941 the General transferred Huff to the army, commissioned him a lieutenant colonel, and made him his senior aide. Among those who followed were Captain Hugh J. Casey, an engineer, and Major William F. Marquat, an antiaircraft officer, in 1937; Lieutenant Colonel Richard J. Marshall, MacArthur’s deputy chief of staff, in 1938; and Colonel Charles Willoughby, his intelligence chief, in 1939. Willoughby, a great buffalo of a man, was known to the rest of the staff as “Sir Charles.” A native of Germany—his original name had been Karl Weidenbach—he spoke with a thick Teutonic accent, admired Franco, and, as another officer put it, appeared to be “always looking out over a high board fence.”53
Sir Charles might be expected to have been unpopular with the others, but they sympathized with him because he was at odds with the most-hated man around MacArthur: Eisenhower’s replacement as chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Richard K. Sutherland. Sutherland had joined them after Ord’s flaming death. Tall, thin, dour, a Yale graduate and the son of a West Virginia senator who became a Supreme Court justice, Sutherland was both efficient and ruthless. Robert Eichelberger, who used code names in his letters to his wife (MacArthur was always “Sarah,” for Sarah Bernhardt), called Sutherland “a smoothie” and said that he had “to be something of one myself in dealing with him.” Everyone else found the new chief of staff rough. Clark Lee, the newspaper correspondent, thought him “brusque, short-tempered, autocratic, and of a generally antagonizing nature.” To Carlos Romulo he was “a martinet.” George Kenney considered him egotistical and arrogant, an officer who “always rubbed people the wrong way.”54
Sutherland’s political views were even odder than Willoughby’s. One evening at dinner the chief of staff argued that America should abandon democracy in wartime, that Congress wasted too much time debating, that elections should be abolished and a dictatorship proclaimed. According to another officer:
General MacArthur listened for a while and then told Sutherland he was wrong; that democracy works and will always work, because the people are allowed to think, to talk, and keep their minds free, open, and supple. He said that while the dictator state may plan a war, get everything worked out down to the last detail, launch the attack, and do pretty well at the beginning, eventually something goes wrong with the plan. Something interrupts the schedule. Now, the regimented minds of the dictator command are not flexible enough to handle quickly the changed situation. They have tried to make war a science when it is actually an art. He went on to say that a democracy, on the other hand, produces hundreds and thousands of flexible-minded, free-thinking leaders who will take advantage of the dictator’s troubles and mistakes and think of a dozen ways to outthink and defeat him. As long as a democracy can withstand the initial onslaught, it will find ways of striking back and eventually it will win. It costs money and at times does look inefficient but, in the final analysis, democracy as we have it in the United States is the best form of government that man has ever evolved. He paused and said, “The trouble with you, Dick, I am afraid, is that you are a natural-born autocrat.”
MacArthur himself was a natural-born autocrat, of course, but he knew American history and understood its significance.55
In 1940 Indochina was a French colony, and when France fell that spring the impact on Asia was immense. The previous year Japanese troops had seized virtually the whole east coast of China. Now they occupied northern Vietnam, outflanking the Philippines, and on September 27 Tokyo signed the Tripartite Pact, joining the Rome-Berlin Axis; the three powers agreed to come to the assistance of one another should any one of them become involved in war with a nation not then a belligerent—in other words, the United States. Quezon watched helplessly. A limited state of national emergency was declared in the commonwealth, but nothing was done to mobilize the islands, and the annual defense appropriation was one-eighth of what MacArthur had been promised in 1935. He considered resigning, but the unpredictable Quezon pleaded with him to stay, and the General, agreed, saying, “This is a call of duty I cannot overlook.”56
If Quezon was unrealistic, so, to some extent, was MacArthur. His public response to the world events of those convulsive years was to wish them away, or pretend that they didn’t exist. Hanson Baldwin, Fletcher Pratt, and George Fielding Eliot agreed that his defense plan was fatally flawed, but the General was undiscouraged. Writing in the Christian Science Monitor of November 2, 1938, he had declared that Luzon had “only two coastal regions in which a hostile army of any size could land. Each of these is broken by strong defensive positions, which, if properly manned and prepared would present to any attacking force a practically impossible problem of penetration.” After the outbreak of war in Europe he reaffirmed that “it would be a matter of serious doubt whether an enemy could concentrate superior forces at any vital Philippine area,” that a “Japanese blockade would be practically unfeasible without the tacit agreement of the other nations surrounding the Pacific,” and that occupying the islands, even if they could be conquered, would cripple the Japanese strategically.57
One correspondent who pressed him hard on this was Hersey. Germany, the General assured the reporter, had instructed Japan not to stir up any more trouble in the Pacific. Rising and pacing, he declared that if Japan did enter the war, the Americans, the British, and the Dutch could handle her with about half the forces they now had deployed in the Pacific, that “the Japanese navy would be either destroyed or bottled up tight.” Stopping in mid-stride, MacArthur vigorously shook his visitor’s hand and bade him good-bye. “You go out,” Hersey reported, “feeling a little brisker yourself, a little more cheery and more confident about things. What you have heard came, after all, straight from the man who knows, and he got it from his wonderful military intelligence.”58
When the situation worsened—day by day the tentacles of the Japanese octopus crept farther southward—MacArthur continued to be serene, though he based his optimism on a new premise. He still insisted that the commonwealth might “achieve a respectable defense and enjoy a reasonable safety if it is prepared and determined to repel attacks classed as adventurous, both in strength and purpose,” and he remained convinced that the tactical difficulties of an overseas invasion were staggering—that there was a “lack of a plausible reason for attack”—but now, for the first time, he emphasized the “ultimate responsibility” of the United States for assuring the safety of the islands, describing his small army of Filipinos as merely “a practical reserve for the small contingent of American forces stationed in this outpost.”59
The ball was now in Washington’s court. And Washington, at last, was preparing to acknowledge it. As early as the Munich Conference, in the fall of 1938, the War Department’s War Plans Division had begun pondering the wisdom of a U.S. military buildup in
the Philippines. MacArthur had not been told of it on the ground that since the end of 1937 he had been merely the employee of an American commonwealth and therefore was not privy to secret information. That was absurd. Indeed, of all the blunders perpetrated by the United States as the Filipinos awaited the onslaught of the Japanese, one of the worst, in retrospect, was the division of army command until it was too late. On the one hand there was Field Marshal MacArthur with his native troops. On the other hand there was the Philippine Department: American soldiers and Philippine Scouts, the scouts being carried on the rolls as members of the U.S. Army. Under these circumstances, much depended on the relationship between the commonwealth’s Field Marshal and the U.S. general commanding the Philippine Department, and MacArthur’s record for sharing authority was not encouraging.60
In the spring of 1940 he had a stroke of luck. His new opposite number in the Philippine Department was Major General George Grunert, an old friend. By the end of the summer Grunert was advising George Marshall that the United States should reject “appeasement and catering to Japan” and reporting that the mood in the islands was pessimistic only because of America’s “lack of an announced policy backed by visual evidence of defense means and measures.” He urged more U.S. officers to train the Filipinos, more American troops on the islands, and “a really strong air force and a strong submarine force both based in the Philippines.” Together, he and MacArthur persuaded Quezon to abandon his defeatism and write Washington, requesting a stronger U.S. military presence in the islands. Quezon’s letter in October was followed a month later by another warning from Grunert, who now was less concerned about Philippine gloom than about the possibility that the War Department might be misled over the commonwealth army’s state of preparedness. He sent Marshall a newspaper clipping which reported that the commonwealth already possessed twelve divisions ready for combat. Grunert pointed out that the target date for MacArthur’s defense plan was six years away, and that his progress was, for reasons over which he had little control, feeble.61
Lights were burning past midnight in War Department offices every night now. On October 10 the War Plans Division recommended withdrawal of all U.S. forces in the Pacific east of the 180° meridian. This would have meant sacrificing, not only the Philippines, but U.S. posts on Guam and Wake. It would have entailed forfeiting Manila Bay, the finest anchorage under the American flag in the western Pacific, commanding the north-south shipping lanes from Japan through the South China Sea. Yet in the context of the time it made sense. The Orange plan had assumed a conflict between just two powers, the United States and Japan. But the present war was global. Already American and British officers were engaged in secret staff talks. The upshot of them was the U.S.–British Commonwealth Joint Basic War Plan, or, as it later became known, Rainbow Five. Adopted by Roosevelt’s Joint Army-Navy Board on June 2, 1941, its basic premise was that in the event of hostilities between the United States and the Axis, the Allies would conquer Italy and Germany first. As for Japan, Allied “strategy in the Far East will be defensive” because “the United States does not intend to add to its present military strength” there. The Philippines, in short, was being abandoned before the opening shot. No one put it quite that way, and there were no plans for evacuating the Americans in the islands, but that was the gist of it.62
Isolationist sentiment being as strong as it was, few Americans, including MacArthur, even knew that the talks were being held. It was just as well. He was sufficiently discouraged as it was. Late each evening he paced the floor of his penthouse library. (Once at 2:00 A.M. a guest in the room below phoned the hotel desk to protest, “Doesn’t that guy know what time it is?”) He was weighing the future and what role, if any, he would play in it. Grunert agreed with him that the entire archipelago could be defended, and had so informed the War Department. That was good. But the department was assuming that when the conflict came, Grunert would direct the defense of the islands. That, from MacArthur’s point of view, was bad. Grunert was a good officer, but the coming struggle would require a military genius. The General in the penthouse had no doubts about the identity of that genius.63
Over three years had passed since his retirement. The War Department now regarded him as an outsider. Chief of Staff Marshall, whom he had once exiled to the Illinois National Guard, was a protégé of Malin Craig, who was a protégé of Pershing—it was Chaumont all over again. And MacArthur could scarcely have welcomed the prospect of accepting orders from men who had been colonels, or in some instances captains, when he was Chief of Staff. Nevertheless, on February 1, 1941, he moved to reopen his relationship with them. Writing to George Marshall, he pointed out that he had confronted, not only the task “of preparing the commonwealth for independent defense by 1946, but also the mission given me by President Roosevelt, so to coordinate its development as to be utilizable to the maximum possible during the transitory period while the United States has the obligations of sovereignty.” The Orange plan, he said, was dead. What was now contemplated was the defense of the Philippines as a “homogeneous unit.” Recapitulating his ambitious program, he estimated that he would soon have about 125,000 troops ready to fight, supported by aircraft and a naval corps “whose primary striking element will consist of from thirty to fifty high-speed motor torpedo boats.” He believed he could “provide an adequate defense at the beach against a landing operation of 100,000, which is estimated to be the maximum initial effort of the most powerful potential enemy.” The keystone of the arch was his intention to block all straits leading to the Philippines’ inland sea, thus leaving those waters free for the movement of friendly ships. But he needed more equipment. Among other materiel he wanted shipments of mines, seven twelve-inch guns, twenty-five 155-millimeter guns, ammunition for coast defense guns, and thirty-two mobile searchlights.64
Nothing happened. Things were drifting badly. He needed a friend in high places, and as it happened he had a good one: Steve Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary. The two men had become acquainted on the eve of World War I, when Early, then a young Associated Press reporter covering the War Department, had met Major MacArthur, the department’s spokesman. Now in April 1941 the General sent Early a note, suggesting that he explore with FDR the possibility of appointing MacArthur commander of all soldiers, U.S. and Filipino, in the archipelago. At the time this, too, seemed fruitless, though there were a few flickers of interest. On May 21 Grunert invited MacArthur to attend some strategy conferences. That same day Stimson kept an appointment with Joseph Stevenot, a Philippine telephone executive, who urged even closer ties between the two generals in Manila. More important, Stimson wrote in his diary that evening, “Marshall incidentally told me that in case of trouble out there they intended to recall General MacArthur into service again and place him in command.” But no whisper of this reached Calle Victoria or the Manila Hotel. The only word which did was unofficial and discouraging. Commissioner J. M. Johnson of the Interstate Commerce Commission wrote the General that, while chatting with Early at a Washington golf club, the commissioner had urged a larger role for MacArthur in the Far East. In Johnson’s words, the press secretary had replied that “you had offered your services and a place was sought for you and no suitable place had been found.” Concluding that all his efforts had been futile, MacArthur wrote Marshall on May 29 that he had reserved a stateroom on the next ship home. He was going to shut down his Manila operation and move to San Antonio. He sent Early a copy, and this time he got action.65
“By God, it was destiny that brought me here,” the General would say of his return to active command. Actually it was politics. Mark S. Watson, the military historian, has been unable to trace the exact sequence of events which led to MacArthur’s return to the U.S. Army, but we know generally what happened. Through Early, MacArthur had a direct pipeline to and from the President. As Watson has noted, MacArthur’s May 29 letter to Marshall was “singularly authoritative . . . in it he disclosed a fuller foreknowledge of events than General Marshall hims
elf seems to have possessed.” Clark Lee has noted that the General in the Philippines had gone “over Marshall’s head to maneuver his own recall and appointment as overall commander in the Philippines at this time. Marshall was considering such action, but MacArthur seems to have forced his hand.”66
Strong initiatives having come from Manila for the second time, the oval office now responded with equal vigor. Some men in the War Department might have preferred Grunert at the helm, but the commander in chief wanted MacArthur as his senior soldier in the Orient, and the President, like the General, was accustomed to having his way. Channels between the department and the House on the Wall were now wide open, and on June 20* Marshall wrote MacArthur that he and Stimson had “decided that your outstanding qualifications and vast experience in the Philippines make you the logical selection for the Army in the Far East should the situation approach a crisis. The Secretary has delayed recommending your appointment as he does not feel the time has arrived for such action. However, he has authorized me to tell you that, at the proper time, he will recommend to the President that you be so appointed.” Marshall added dryly: “It is my impression that the President will approve his recommendation.”67