American Caesar

  Diaries, memoirs, and recollections of those who worked around him provide a graphic picture of what MacArthur was like at this time. Now sixty-two, his condition was that of a man of fifty-two. Broad-shouldered, flat-hipped, slim, and slightly stooped, he still carried himself with soldierly grace. His step was quick and sure, his profile chiseled, his wrinkles confined to puckers around his eyes and mouth. He radiated good health, vitality, and nervous energy. Ever the peacock, he was sensitive about his thinning black hair, and combed it carefully to camouflage the places where his scalp was visible. He manicured his nails regularly and wore pleats in his regulation khaki trousers to conceal his slight paunch. He hated neckties, possibly because he liked to display his strong, youthful neck. Airborne, or in Brisbane, he wore a flier’s leather jacket Kenney had given him, with a name tag on the breast and four white stars painted on each shoulder. In conferences he usually carried a bulldog pipe or a cigar as a stage prop. E. J. Kahn, Jr., noted that soldiers of all ranks never tired of looking for his “flourishable cane,” the “gold braid swarming on his floppy hat,” and his “inimitable, strolling magnificence.”89

  The cap, repeatedly immersed aboard PT-41, had shrunk. The General told Sid Huff to get a hat stretcher. In all Australia, Huff found, there was none for sale. Finally he persuaded a Melbourne haberdasher to lend him one while he had another made. Every night thereafter, as long as MacArthur wore a uniform, his cap was stretched while he slept. That was partly a sign of his vanity, but it also reflected his style of leadership. While Eisenhower, a great leveler, appealed to egalitarian passions, MacArthur exulted in the paraphernalia of authority and saw himself as a commander from an earlier, more dashing time. For him, every battle was invested with the air of a lurid morality play. After one he said with satisfaction, “The dead of Bataan will rest easier tonight,” and after American fighter planes had ambushed Yamamoto’s Mitsubishi over Rabaul, and killed the admiral, MacArthur fancied he could “almost hear the rising crescendo of sound from the thousands of glistening white skeletons at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.” Once, when his physician referred to U.S. troops as “GIs,” he turned on him in cold fury and snapped, “Don’t ever do that in my presence. They are the men who are going to get us to Japan.” The doctor protested that that was what infantrymen called themselves, that it was meant affectionately. MacArthur shook his head. He said, “ ‘GI’ means ‘General Issue.’ Call them soldiers, fighters, or men.” Later he came to accept “GI,” but he always addressed his officers as “comrades in arms.” It was a warmer, more lustrous, less dehumanizing term. Churchill once observed that “war, which was cruel and glorious, has become cruel and sordid.” To the General it would always retain a nimbus of glory. His critics thought that ridiculous. His admirers believed it made him a more effective leader. Both were right.90

  Huff bought him another hat, a civilian homburg, to be worn should he decide to go to the movies in Brisbane. MacArthur never even tried it on. He saw few films during the war, and those while aboard warships. If he had appeared in mufti his image might have been tarnished, and he was unwilling to risk that. He preferred to pace the Moresby veranda at night, his head bowed, his light burning late, his shadow on the shade, his officers telling one another, “The old man’s rug-cutting again.” During a staff conference he would swiftly switch moods, now whispering, now shouting, now lapsing into devastating silences. News cameramen found that he liked to be snapped with a framed quotation from Lincoln in the background, thus inviting interesting comparisons.* Many of the articles cabled from New Guinea by magazine writers sound like drama notices. A Life staffer said of his soliloquies that he could “talk for hours and never grope for a word.” Such performances, Frank L. Kluckhohn reported in the New York Times Magazine, heightened the impression that the General was “not one man but many. He is both a cold-blooded strategist and an impelling, controversial personality. In him great self-confidence is mingled with humility, unusual assurance with professional sensitivity to unjust criticism.” A Collier’s correspondent observed: “That MacArthur is a born actor seems beyond dispute. His famous fighting bonnet, with the scrambled eggs upon it; his grandiloquent communiques; his careful attention to dress—all these are characteristic of a man who considers himself a child of destiny, likes the spotlight, and thereby sets a lot of teeth on edge.”91

  One officer whose teeth were set on edge was Eichelberger, himself a lover of the limelight. He wrote his wife that “Sarah” was “dominating the stage and, at the same time, fighting off—as he sees it—a great mass of personal enemies, both foreign and domestic, who have no connection with our natural enemy, the Japanese.” Eichelberger compared the jockeying for power among the General’s subordinates to Shanghai poker games “where the cuspidor was put on the center of the table because no one dared look away to spit,” and he concluded that as long as MacArthur trod the boards no figures would be allowed to “rise up between him and his place in history.” Much as Eichelberger enjoyed seeing his own name in headlines, he told an army public-relations officer: “I would rather have you slip a rattlesnake in my pocket than to have you give me any publicity,” When stories about Eichelberger appeared in Life and the Saturday Evening Post, the General summoned him and said: “Do you realize I could reduce you to the grade of colonel tomorrow and send you home?” He didn’t do it, but any subordinate whose fame eclipsed his own, even briefly, was under such a cloud. The General’s interest in war correspondents’ stories about himself never flagged. Tillman Durdin of the New York Times noted that “he has a way of telling newspaper men more about their own organizations than they know themselves.” In Moresby, George H. Johnston found that the Supreme Commander was reading his copy line for line and sometimes sending it back for revision: “Where I had said, ‘MacArthur is just as aloof and mysterious as when he was in Australia,’ the word ‘remote’ was suggested in preference to ‘aloof I altered the dispatch. ‘Remote’ was a better word.”92

  To Miss Em, Eichelberger confided that “Sarah . . . prides herself on being cute or smooth or subtle or whatever one would call it. Thinking others liars, it is easy to excuse a matching cuteness in herself.” Another officer, Clovis E. Byers, discovered that a MacArthur promise was good only if he sealed it with a handclasp; “Shake on it, General,” Byers would say, extending his hand, and sometimes MacArthur would draw back. If he then broke his word, as he occasionally did, the promisee would be disillusioned. His eternal suspicion of the Pentagon alienated others. A naval officer was shocked when the General said, “There are some people in Washington who would rather see MacArthur lose a battle than America win a war,” and Hap Arnold thought he still bore psychological scars from the struggle in the Philippines: “My impression . . . was that he was very battle weary; he had not yet had a chance to recover nor to get the whole world picture. He did not yet know the details of what was going on in the other theaters . . . . I was sure the statements he made to me as he walked up and down his office were not ones he would make six months hence.”93

  Yet if he wished to be engaging, he could be irresistible. Recalling his first day as the General’s ranking naval subordinate, Barbey wrote that “it was a pleasure to listen to MacArthur. He had the voice and manner of an orator and though I was but an audience of one, he spoke deliberately as if what he said would be recorded for posterity. He was convincing and exhilarating. “ Admiral Halsey, meeting him for the first time in Brisbane, was similarly captivated: “If he had been wearing civilian clothes, I still would have known at once that he was a soldier. . . . My mental picture poses him . . . pacing his office, almost wearing a groove between his large, bare desk and the portrait of George Washington that faced it; his corncob pipe is in his hand (I rarely saw him smoke it); and he is making his points in a diction I have never heard surpassed.”94

  Like everyone else, Barbey and Halsey were impressed by the Generals extraordinary memory. Newsweek observed that “MacArthur has the invaluable faculty of remembering na
mes and a few pertinent facts about the most casual acquaintances.” Receiving Charles Lindbergh, MacArthur immediately plunged into a technical discussion of P-38 fighters which resulted in an increase of the warplanes’ range of anywhere from four hundred to six hundred miles, depending on conditions, by adding belly tanks. In Port Moresby he kept in touch with Canberra by teletype and telephone; his messages revealed a keen interest in Australian politics. Yet he never missed a trick on his battlefronts. He not only knew precisely where Allied troops were and what they were doing; he also continued to possess an astonishing knowledge of the enemy. Wyman W. Parker, then a naval intelligence officer on MacArthur’s staff, remembers the General correcting one of his reports, telling him that a certain Japanese unit couldn’t be in Hong Kong, because it had just been moved from Shanghai to Singapore. He knew the strength of the unit, the name of its commander, which engagements it had fought, and how it had performed. Tillman Durdin wrote, “The Southwest Pacific war theater is unmistakably MacArthur’s. Divisions move, airdromes get built, air squadrons operate—all in consonance with MacArthur’s will. Things get done with dispatch, directness and confidence and with a purposefulness that reflects a strong, able leadership. ‘ At the same time, the General knew how to delegate authority. Sutherland told Kluckhohn: “The boss likes to sit around and think. He . . . outlines his plan [and] makes the decisions he has deemed necessary. Then he leaves it to us. But heaven help us if anything goes wrong.”95

  Strolling around the veranda, he would outline a coming operation to Sutherland and the others, and, pointing the stem of his pipe at each officer, would crisply outline individual assignments. Then he would draft a detailed plan which, one of them recalls, would be “a volume inches thick. Every commander thoroughly familiarized himself with his section of it; MacArthur knew it all.” In most instances their contacts with him were confined to answering questions and receiving orders. He intended it to be that way; that was what he meant by “remote.” George Kenney was an exception, however, and he provides rare glimpses of the General’s lighter side. Returning to Moresby after a week in Australia, he found his way barred by MacArthur, who said solemnly, “George, I’ve got some bad news for you. While you were gone, I stole your room. Mine was so hot that I tried yours one night. It’s much cooler, so I’ve moved. But all your things are in their proper places. I even had the picture of that woman relocated, so that you can see it from the same angle as you did before.” The photograph was of Theda Bara, the silent-screen siren, and for the next week Kenney sweated under it. Then, with the arrival of the wet, New Guineas prevailing winds shifted 180 degrees. He had the coolest room in Papua again, and MacArthur had the hottest. “However,” he recalls, “the General never even mentioned the subject again, and I don’t believe it was because he had gotten used to the heat.”96

  Unable to sleep, and missing his small family, MacArthur spent long evenings in the bungalow’s library. An earlier tenant had been highly literate; the shelves were packed with books in several languages. Unless he was preoccupied with battle reports, the General would pace the room hour after hour, a volume open in his left hand, reading of Papuan aborigines, native lore, and anthropology, or, if he was in the mood for European literature, the works of Zola, Shaw, Ibsen, and others. Phrases from this cultural smorgasbord would find their way into the aureate communiques he dictated to Diller each morning. Durdin wrote, “He can quote Shakespeare, the Bible, Napoleon, Mark Twain, and Lincoln in expounding a single idea,” and Johnston reported that he drew “for parallel and metaphor on . . .a melodrama he had seen in New York a quarter of a century before, on . . . a statement by Plato, or sometimes on a passage from Scripture.” Curiously, neither correspondent mentioned the book the General enjoyed most: Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment.97

  In Dostoevski’s novel the key tension lies in the relationship between Porfiry, the police inspector, and Raskolnikov, the murderer. Porfiry understands the conflicts and patterns of thought in Raskolnikov’s mind, and in the end that is the criminal’s undoing. Similarly, MacArthur was trying to make a mental leap over the towering green hell of the Owen Stanley Range, to the coconut-fringed village of three houses and five huts called Buna. There the Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Hatazo Adachi, was poring over the same Papuan maps MacArthur was studying and, like him, was issuing orders to feverish troops in the jungly mountains. In such terrain stalemate was impossible. The front line was in constant flux, and ultimately one side or the other would have to give way. Adachi, the General believed, now realized that at last, after a year of conquests, the Japanese reach had exceeded its grasp. Taking Buna by frontal assault would be a miserable business, but once it fell to MacArthur the entire Southwest Pacific theater would lie open for a war of Allied maneuver and envelopment.98

  So his GIs and diggers hacked their way through Papua’s dense rain forests, forded its deep rivers, climbed its banyan trees to become snipers, scaled its abrupt cliffs, and descended the slopes of the foothills on the far side of the mountains, where they debouched on a low, flat coastal plain of coconut plantations, missionary settlements, and clusters of thatched shanties on stilts. Their objectives were Buna, the nearby village of Gona, and, between them, Sanananda Point. MacArthur’s G-2 (intelligence) confidently predicted that all three would be “easy pickings” because “only a shell of sacrifice troops” had been left to defend them. For the first time in the war the arrows on newspaper maps pointed at Japan, not Australia, and the General exulted.99

  Unfortunately the arrows weren’t moving. G-2 had been wrong. There were seventy-five hundred Japanese in front of Buna alone, trained bush fighters in coconut-log bunkers sheltering Nambu machine guns with interlocking fields of fire. Enjoying good lateral communications, they were easily reinforced at night by fleets of destroyers from Rabaul. Kenney now owned the air over Moresby, and eventually his fliers would ferry a million tons over the Owen Stanleys, but in the early weeks of the battle they were turned back by the prodigious cloudbursts in the mountains. Japanese pilots faced no such obstacle; swarms of them flew down from Rabaul’s teeming hives, making life even more miserable for the drenched Allied soldiers. Equally exasperating, U.S. troops were handicapped by what Robert E. Sherwood called “a hopelessly defensive state of mind.” The ultimate humiliation for the theater’s commander in chief came when the Australian officer leading his ground forces told him that fresh troops dispatched to the front should be drawn from Australian reserves, since the diggers were plainly outfighting the GIs. 100

  MacArthur was enraged, the more so because he knew the criticism of U.S. soldiers was fully justified. On November 30 he directed Sutherland to summon Eichelberger, his most aggressive American field commander, from Australia. On arriving, Eichelberger sensed that something big was in the wind. The chief of staff, who until now, as he later recalled, had treated him with “studied discourtesy,” as “more like a lieutenant than a lieutenant general,” was polite, and when they reached the commander in chief’s bungalow, MacArthur and the rest of the staff were waiting on the screened veranda. Only Kenney was relaxed and smiling. The others looked grim, and the General was grimmest of all. Explaining the Mexican standoff before Buna, MacArthur spread his hands, looked heavenward, and asked tragically, “Must I always lead a forlorn hope?” He ordered Eichelberger to relieve the commanding officer of the U.S. 32nd Infantry Division and his timid subordinates “or I will relieve them myself and you, too. “ After pacing the veranda several times, he paused, aimed his pipe stem at the newcomer, and said in his throbbing baritone: “If you capture Buna I’ll award you the Distinguished Service Cross, I’ll recommend you for a high British decoration, and”—the greatest prize of all—“I’ll release your name for newspaper publication. “ Again he paced, and again he paused. He said with great intensity: “Bob, take Buna or don’t come back alive.” He meant it, too. Later in the week word reached Moresby that Eichelberger, like MacArthur in World War I, was wearing his insignia of rank on
the battlefield. A worried Australian officer asked the General to forbid that and to order him to stop leading troops personally; otherwise, the Australian said, he would be killed. MacArthur replied coldly: “I want him to die if he doesn’t get Buna.”101

  Eichelberger’s letters to his wife reveal extraordinarily mixed feelings about his commander in chief. He told her, “He is certainly a fascinating person and an inspiring leader,” and two weeks after his arrival at the front he wrote enthusiastically, “Had a grand letter from the Big Chief.” But ten days after that he and his men were appalled by a pious MacArthur communique: “On Christmas Day our activities were limited to routine safety precautions. Divine services were held.” In fact there were no services. The fighting that day was desperate and in doubt; Eichelberger later called it “the low point in my life,” and said he had wondered then whether Buna would become “an American military disaster.” The General announced that the Japanese were “trapped within the Buna beachhead” when the beachhead was actually fifty miles wide. On January 8, after the Australians had taken Gona and the Americans had overrun Buna government station, MacArthur flew back to Brisbane with Kenney, telling correspondents: “The Papuan campaign is in its final closing stage. The Sanananda position has now been completely enveloped. A remnant of the enemy’s forces is entrenched there and faces certain destruction. . . . This can now be regarded as accomplished. ”102