The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (6 page)

But Eisenhower had other qualities, including an ability to build political networks. During his work on industrial mobilization, for example, he met a group of thinkers who would be important to Roosevelt. Among them was wealthy Wall Street stock manipulator Bernard Baruch, a self-made South Carolinian who sported a bowler hat, pince-nez, and an infectious smile. Having headed up Woodrow Wilson’s War Industries Board during World War One, Baruch found Eisenhower’s work on industrial mobilization appealing. The view that Eisenhower was an anonymous presence prior to his meteoric rise during World War Two undervalues this early experience and Eisenhower’s vast network of political contacts. But it wasn’t just Baruch and those around the Southern investor who were important to Eisenhower’s emerging influence. Eisenhower came to MacArthur with a reputation as an outspoken military theorist. One of the aide’s earliest associations was with
George Patton, who convinced him that the tank would revolutionize warfare. Additionally, and because of Patton, Eisenhower met Major General Fox Conner, who had been John Pershing’s military planner during the Great War. Conner, a brilliant strategist, was impressed by Eisenhower and, while commanding the U.S. garrison in Panama, insisted that Eisenhower be appointed his chief of staff. When Ike arrived, Conner provided him with a tutorial on military history and suggested that Eisenhower get to know George Marshall, the army’s most brilliant young officer. When Conner thought about the next war, he thought of Patton and Eisenhower leading great tank armies, racing over the fields of northern France with Marshall as their senior commander. This was in 1922, when people still thought the Great War was “the war to end all wars.” Conner knew better.

Although Eisenhower’s influence on MacArthur’s military thinking cannot be known with certainty, after Eisenhower joined MacArthur’s office in February 1933, the chief of staff began to spend increasing amounts of time thinking about the next war and how it would be fought. Fox Conner’s ideas, filtered through Eisenhower, only confirmed for MacArthur what he had seen for himself during a series of trips to Europe during the Hoover years. MacArthur’s observations sparked his constant warnings about European rearmament and his deep discomfort with the rise of German National Socialism. These trips spurred MacArthur to upgrade the regimen of the army’s Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth and the curriculum of the Army War College, both of which represented the center of the service’s intellectual thinking. MacArthur also paid close attention to the development of a new combat rifle, turning down the recommendation of army developers who wanted to adopt a small-caliber Garand rifle for the army’s infantrymen. He preferred that soldiers be armed with a larger-caliber semiautomatic rifle. The resulting M1 Garand became the all-purpose rifle for the army and one of the most celebrated and reliable infantry weapons in history.

MacArthur also began to think in greater detail about Eisenhower’s ideas on industrial mobilization, Patton’s ideas on tank warfare, and Benny Foulois’s plan to develop new fighters and bombers. It was Foulois’s views that provided him with his greatest intellectual challenge.

Although he didn’t dismiss Foulois’s claim that one day the sky would be filled with fighters and bombers, MacArthur disagreed with Foulois’s notion that the army air corps should be made a separate military service—a U.S. Air Force, with its own chain of command. MacArthur was willing to concede that the future of warfare would include fighters and bombers, but he wanted to make sure they were under the army’s command. His views had nothing to do with warfare and everything to do with interservice rivalry. The army’s retention of its air arm would enable it to garner a larger share of the military budget at the expense of the navy, which is what MacArthur really wanted. But much as Foulois liked MacArthur, the air corps head did not agree that the air corps should take a lower public profile.

In the wake of the airmail scandal, Foulois ordered six B-10 bombers on an adventuresome flight from Washington, D.C., to Fairbanks, Alaska, and back. But Foulois kept the mission secret from MacArthur, primarily because the army chief was then engaged with the navy in delicate negotiations over which service would be responsible for U.S. coastal defenses. To head the mission, Foulois picked air corps flier Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, a fiery officer who had been taught to fly by the Wright brothers and was a respected survivor of the airmail fiasco. The Arnold mission was a success, with the six B-10s leaving Washington in June and returning intact on August 20, 1934. Arnold’s feat thrust him into the public limelight and dampened criticism of the air corps. But MacArthur was furious—Arnold’s Alaska mission buttressed Foulois’s argument that the air corps should be an independent service and interfered with MacArthur’s negotiations on coastal defense responsibilities with the navy. MacArthur took his retribution: He made certain that while Arnold received the Distinguished Flying Cross, none of the other mission pilots would be recognized. When Arnold protested, MacArthur angrily turned him away. Even so, in private, MacArthur was impressed: Arnold’s mission demonstrated the potential of a new generation of bombers and their long-range capabilities.

In the wake of Arnold’s mission, MacArthur decided that while he disagreed with the call for an independent air force, the establishment of a separate air headquarters
inside
the army was essential. To this end, he convinced Secretary of War Dern to appoint a civilian board to study
how to most effectively use the army air corps. The board was headed up by former Secretary of War Newton Baker and included as a part of its mandate the identification of a replacement for Foulois. When the Baker board recommended the creation of a “General Headquarters, Air Force,” which would report directly to the chief of staff, MacArthur not only endorsed the decision, but also appointed Brigadier General Frank Andrews to head it. MacArthur’s appointment of Andrews came as a shock, for while the two had graduated from West Point within a year of each other, Andrews disliked MacArthur, blaming him for the air arm’s meager funding. For once, MacArthur brushed aside this personal animus and gave Andrews the job. Andrews was the air arm’s Fox Conner, the new U.S. Army Air Forces’ leading strategic thinker. But while Conner envisioned armies of tanks racing across the fields of northern France, Andrews envisioned fleets of aircraft flying over them.

The Arnold mission and the Baker report reinforced MacArthur’s new thinking on the future of warfare and the importance of tanks and bombers in the U.S. arsenal. But he had not yet constructed a model to explain how these newer, bigger, and more lethal machines would be used. So beginning in August 1934, the distant, alien, and still unwanted figure of the Roosevelt administration, the man who came, smiled, and then left White House receptions—and who did battle with congressman Ross Collins—simply disappeared. Not only did MacArthur not show up for work at his office late in the morning, as was his habit, but some days, he didn’t show up at all. Instead, he spent day after day by himself, in his library at Quarters Number One, his official residence across the Potomac River at Fort Myer. He was reading.

D
ouglas MacArthur’s command of facts was prodigious. As a commander in the Great War, he studied intelligence documents and briefed his subordinates on their contents. He spoke of the strength of the enemy, its commanders, its weaponry, its defenses, the terrain features the Americans would encounter, the plan they should follow, the obstacles they would face—and all without the use of a single note. MacArthur read voraciously, a habit seeded in a childhood surrounded by books. Arthur MacArthur owned a library of some four
thousand volumes, which his son inherited. These books the son moved, box by box, through each of his assignments until finally, when he was named chief of staff, they adorned the shelves of his Fort Myer home. To these MacArthur proudly added his own collection of military memoirs, biographies, and popular histories. A remnant of that early collection remains today at the MacArthur archives in Norfolk, Virginia. Included are dozens of volumes that MacArthur read in late 1934, as he searched for a strategy that the army might adopt in a future war.

Among the volumes of books that MacArthur read during the late summer of 1934 were the classic standards of any military library: Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Jomini. But they stand relatively pristine next to the several dozen well-thumbed accounts of Napoleon’s campaigns. For the nonspecialist, these are dense tomes, minute-by-minute accounts of the movements of regiments and brigades, divisions and entire armies, complete with maps. For an era consumed with endless recollections of America’s own Civil War, including biographies of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Ulysses S. Grant, MacArthur’s tastes were decidedly European. It was Napoleon, and not Lee or Jackson, whom he admired, quoted, followed. Throughout his life, MacArthur cited and repeated Napoleon’s aphorisms, made continued references to his campaigns and battles, outlined his thinking, reviewed the accounts of his numerous victories—and referred to him again and again as history’s greatest captain. What MacArthur admired in Napoleon was his ability to handle enormous numbers of troops over vast distances. More than simply a matter of giving orders, Napoleon’s skill involved an intimate knowledge of how well the soldiers could pin an enemy in place and then surround it, force its retreat, or position it for annihilation. “Are you lucky?” Napoleon would ask his commanders—and so, too, throughout his career, would MacArthur.

Historians cannot know the inner lives of their subjects, but the inner life of Douglas MacArthur undoubtedly lies somewhere in the pages of those books in Norfolk. In the late summer of 1934, he spent every day reading through them, conducting a quiet and personal military tutorial. Slowly, but inexorably, what he read was reflected in his reports to George Dern and Franklin Roosevelt. In the midst of his studies, he wrote to Dern that he believed the next war would be dominated
by tanks and aircraft, a wholly unique view for a veteran of the ghastly inch-by-inch trench fighting of World War One: “The nation that does not command the air will face deadly odds. Armies and navies to operate successfully must have air cover.” The shift in MacArthur’s thinking within just a few months was astonishing. But now, in his Fort Myer library, he analyzed not simply how to bring airpower onto the battlefield, but also how to most effectively coordinate air, land, and sea assets as a unified battle of all arms. It was something that had never been done in the history of warfare.

MacArthur was struck by what he read in a compelling biography of Genghis Khan, the Asian conqueror who used speed and surprise to overwhelm his foes. While MacArthur never cited which biography of Khan he read, it was undoubtedly Harold Lamb’s
Genghis Khan: Emperor of All Men
—still there, in Norfolk, its pages frayed with use. While not scholarly, Lamb’s account of Khan’s tactics was insightful, and the descriptions of how the Mongol conqueror deployed his soldiers made for fascinating, if romanticized, reading. Khan’s deployment of his foot soldiers, with his cavalry on their tough little ponies as outliers, had a marked impact on MacArthur’s thinking and was reflected in his own rapidly evolving strategic views. Here in Lamb’s narrative, MacArthur believed, lay the key to using tanks, light mobile units, and aircraft as weapons that could leap ahead of static armies, cut off and starve large military formations, and strike deep into enemy territory. Most important of all, Khan had deployed his horde as an army of maneuver. Swift and self-sustaining, it conquered vast stretches of territory and brought two empires to their knees. The key was speed and mobility, with large weapons an encumbrance, frontal assaults suicidal, and sieges a thing of the past. For Khan, massed attacks expended the one resource he couldn’t afford to lose: his own men.

MacArthur began to write down his own thoughts on the future of warfare and planned to include these ideas in a report to Dern and Roosevelt when he retired. The report was begun that summer at Fort Myer, but was only perfected after much thinking and rewriting and many more weeks of reading. Although the report would not be released until the next year, it reflected the research that MacArthur had conducted from August until November 1934:

    
He [Khan] devised an organization appropriate to conditions then existing; he raised the discipline and morale of his troops to a level never known in any other army, unless possibly that of Cromwell; he spent every available period of peace to develop subordinate leaders and to produce perfection of training throughout the army, and, finally, he insisted upon speed in action, a speed which by comparison with other forces of his day was almost unbelievable. Though he armed his men with the best equipment of offense and defense that the skill of Asia could produce, he refused to encumber them with loads that would immobilize his army. Over great distances his legions moved so rapidly and secretly as to astound his enemies and practically to paralyze their powers of resistance. He crossed great rivers and mountain ranges, he reduced walled cities in his path and swept onward to destroy nations and pulverize whole civilizations. On the battlefield his troops maneuvered so swiftly and skillfully and struck with such devastating speed that times without number they defeated armies overwhelmingly superior to themselves in number.

When it was released, in the late summer of 1935, the report garnered more attention than MacArthur might have hoped. While his peers included senior officers who were themselves studying how to use tanks, fighters, and bombers, military theorists had different views. The theorists remained stuck in the Great War, where lieutenants and captains ordered their soldiers over the lips of their trenches—and to their deaths. The conflicting views of warfare were not a surprise. The armies of the Great War had been commanded by senior officers who were stuck in the past and who believed that cavalry charges would tip the balance against the enemy. Those who fought disagreed: They thought that masses of infantry would make the difference. But neither was right. The next war would be a war of maneuver and devastating speed—and of air attacks.