The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur (9 page)

The statement reflected America’s plan for defending the island archipelago. Back in 1934, MacArthur had blustered that if war came, he
would immediately “send two divisions from the Atlantic coast to reinforce the Philippines.” He probably meant it, though he must have also known that the current version of War Plan Orange (the name of a series of joint army and navy plans for an anticipated conflict with Japan) presumed that U.S. and Philippine forces would be overwhelmed. The assumption was that the forces would be driven back into Bataan, a wide peninsula to the west of Manila, and thence to the island of Corregidor, at the mouth of Manila Bay. War Plan Orange assumed that despite being surrounded in Bataan and Corregidor, the U.S. Army would hold out, for months if necessary, while the U.S. Navy mounted an operation across the Pacific to rescue it. This was sheer nonsense, and MacArthur knew it. As army chief of staff, he had studied the plan and spoken to the officers assigned to review and update it. Their conclusion was blunt, as one of the plan’s analysts wrote: “To carry out the present Orange Plan—with its provisions for the early dispatch of our fleet to Philippine waters—would be literally an act of madness. In the event of an Orange War, the best that could be hoped for would be that wise counsels would prevail, that our people would acquiesce in the temporary loss of the Philippines, and that the dispatch of our battle fleet would be delayed for two or three years needed for its augmentation.”

W
ithin weeks of MacArthur’s arrival in Manila, he set his staff to work building the Philippine armed forces. He was starting from scratch: from the naming of a general staff to the construction of airfields, from recruiting young Filipinos to training them. But nothing was done quickly, or easily. The work on building a Philippine army had actually begun in Washington, when MacArthur had assigned Jimmy Ord to write a detailed plan based on universal conscription. MacArthur then pulled Eisenhower into the planning, telling him to focus on how a small but highly trained force could protect thousands of miles of coastline. By the time MacArthur departed for Manila, the plan had gone through several drafts. The process had lasted for weeks, with each detail arriving on MacArthur’s desk in neatly bound volumes, before being returned to Ord and Eisenhower with amendments. Once in Manila, MacArthur directed that Ord and Eisenhower cut the budget for his new army to 22 million pesos. “We cut periods of training; cut
down on pay and allowances; eliminated particularly costly elements of the army, and substituted conscripts for professionals wherever we considered it safe to do so,” Eisenhower wrote at the time. But after Ord and Eisenhower presented their revised plan, MacArthur cut it again. “We reduced the Regular Force to 930 officers and about 7000 enlisted men,” Eisenhower remembered, “substituting for the enlisted men so eliminated an equal number of conscripts that are to be retained in the service one year; we extended the munitions procurement program to attain fruition in twenty instead of ten years, and made important deferments in the development of an Artillery Corps and so on.”

MacArthur’s problems were exacerbated by his inability to get the War Department to take the defense of the Philippines seriously. For months after arriving in Manila, MacArthur argued with Washington over its providing him with four hundred thousand rifles at a cost of two dollars per weapon. The problem for MacArthur was not only that the rifles were obsolete (they were overstock Lee-Enfield carbines, manufactured in 1914), but also that the White House didn’t think it wise to arm former
insurrectos
with rifles, no matter how obsolete. The opposition to providing the rifles was led in Manila by High Commissioner Frank Murphy, a pacifist who was privy to MacArthur’s plans and duly passed them on to Harold Ickes, who enjoyed holding up anything MacArthur wanted. The decision on whether to supply the rifles was postponed, then postponed again. Even when Eisenhower convinced War Department officials that there was little likelihood of an insurrection, the administration hesitated. Eisenhower speculated that what was really worrying Washington was that arming Filipinos would “antagonize” the Japanese. That view put MacArthur in an embarrassing situation: He not only had to argue that the weapons were not a threat to the Americans, but also had to argue that the arms weren’t a threat to anyone—a counterintuitive position for a military advisor responsible for building a nation’s defenses. But oddly, the argument was convincing to Washington, which finally agreed to the sale of a hundred thousand outmoded rifles, with another three hundred thousand to follow over eight years.

Now that MacArthur had found weapons for his nascent army, all he needed were soldiers. Eisenhower was skeptical of Filipino recruiting
practices, but pleasantly surprised when 150,000 Filipinos volunteered to serve. The bad news was that MacArthur had planned on training just 7,000 recruits. When MacArthur decided to increase the quota to 40,000 conscripts, he also trebled the training budget, which required another rewrite of the Ord-Eisenhower plan. “Disregarding entirely the cost of arms and ammunition for these men after they have been trained,” Eisenhower wrote, “the additional training and maintenance cost involved will be about 10,000,000 pesos.” The money wasn’t available, and the Roosevelt administration wasn’t going to provide it. One year after his arrival, MacArthur was stuck—his new Philippine Army had plenty of soldiers, but they were untrained and armed with outmoded weapons. He needed money. In late 1936, Eisenhower pressed MacArthur and Quezón to travel to Washington to explain the problem, saying that MacArthur’s high regard in the Senate might make a difference. Quezón immediately accepted this idea, noting that the visit would coincide with the swearing-in of Paul McNutt, a former Indiana governor, as the archipelago’s new high commissioner. A trip to Washington, Quezón also calculated, would allow him to make the case for better Philippine defenses directly to Roosevelt and to present his case that the Philippines should be granted its independence at the end of 1938, instead of in 1946.

Quezón departed Manila in mid-January 1937, accompanied by MacArthur, Jean, and MacArthur’s staff. While Washington was the centerpiece of Quezón’s trip, the Philippine president chose to begin his tour with a visit to Japan. Quezón and this large retinue were treated regally in Tokyo, which welcomed him as a head of state before he was solemnly escorted to an audience with Emperor Hirohito. The Hirohito meeting marks the beginning of MacArthur’s estrangement from the Philippine president: Quezón approached the emperor as a supplicant, nearly begging Hirohito to keep the Philippines out of the crosshairs of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Hirohito nodded sagely, smiled when he thought it appropriate—and said nothing. MacArthur had first visited Japan with his father in 1904 and was as impressed now as he had been then. If anything, Japan was stronger, more disciplined, and more militarized than it had been in the early 1900s. “Cooped up within the narrow land mass of their four main islands, the Japanese were barely able to
feed their burgeoning population,” MacArthur later observed. “Equipped with a splendid labor force, they lacked the raw materials necessary for increased productivity. They lacked sugar, so they took Formosa. They lacked iron, so they took Manchuria. They lacked hard coal and timber, so they invaded China. They lacked security, so they took Korea. . . . It was easy to see that they intended, by force of arms if necessary, to establish an economic sphere completely under their control.”

The Quezón-MacArthur party arrived in Los Angeles in mid-February and stayed there for several weeks, much to MacArthur’s annoyance—he couldn’t understand why Quezón insisted on visiting the city in the first place. He learned soon enough: The Philippine president spent days in Hollywood, hobnobbing with stars and producers (including actor Clark Gable and producer Louis B. Mayer), before traveling on to New York, where the Philippine president was honored with a parade, a banquet, and a meeting with city and state officials. Quezón then appeared at a high-profile Foreign Policy Association luncheon, arranged with great fanfare by MacArthur. But instead of meeting a sympathetic audience, Quezón was subjected to relentless questioning from a roomful of worried pacifists. He was attacked for provoking Japan, for impoverishing his own people for the sake of self-defense, for teaching Filipino children “to kill.” Angered by his reception, Quezón became irritable and defensive, at one point raising his voice to a near shout during the meeting. “If I believed that the Philippines could not defend itself,” he said, “I would commit suicide this afternoon.” Quezón turned on MacArthur, blaming him for failing to make the reporters understand the threats his people faced. MacArthur, for his part, was increasingly frustrated with the Philippine president, who seemed more interested in glitzy receptions than the hard work of diplomacy.

Thus was seeded Quezón’s disastrous visit to Washington, where, as MacArthur later phrased it, the Filipino was “practically ignored.” By now, both men were getting the message: There would be no additional monies for the archipelago’s defense and no munitions shipped to its new army. To make matters worse, Roosevelt announced that he was too busy to meet with Quezón—an astonishing (and undoubtedly purposeful) insult. Yet, as MacArthur also knew, Roosevelt’s decision was, in some sense, understandable. The president had been carefully following
Quezón’s tour, including the flashbulb-popping meetings with stars and starlets. If Quezón was so anxious to defend his countrymen, Roosevelt thought, the man should have made a beeline for Washington instead of stopping in Los Angeles to meet the cast of
Parnell
.

Roosevelt’s announcement that he would not meet with Quezón sent MacArthur scrambling and pleading. But Roosevelt remained indifferent, telling his aides that he would give MacArthur five minutes of his time. But when the former army chief of staff showed up at the White House for his meeting, the president beamed up at him, eyes twinkling, and the two then sat down for what turned into a five-hour meeting. It was a classic Roosevelt-MacArthur back-and-forth in which MacArthur cajoled the president into doing what the president had already decided to do: Roosevelt would meet with Quezón over lunch and hear him out, he told MacArthur, though he would never consider granting the Philippines independence in 1938. The discussion was typical for the two men; unfailingly polite, they maneuvered, parried, lunged and retreated, then lunged and retreated again, all the while testing each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Their discussion was crucial for each of them, for Roosevelt was attempting to assess MacArthur’s thinking on the Pacific, while MacArthur was probing Roosevelt’s political plans.

Roosevelt had his lunch with Quezón the following week. Waving away Quezón’s arguments for Philippine independence, Roosevelt smiled indulgently at MacArthur’s request for more arms for Manila and then affably shook hands with both men as they bid the president farewell. Quezón thought the visit to Washington was a great success, but MacArthur knew otherwise: Their effort to extract weapons from the United States failed miserably. After their meeting at the White House, the Philippine president traveled on to Mexico before departing for Manila, and MacArthur returned to New York. There, on the morning of April 30, at Manhattan’s Municipal Building, MacArthur surprised everyone by marrying Jean Faircloth in a modest civil ceremony. “It was perhaps the smartest thing I have ever done,” he later wrote.

F
rom the moment he returned to Manila in June 1937, America’s man in the Philippines charted an independent course
for himself and Quezón’s government. In this, he played the role of an American St. Paul—he was all things to all people, showing a different face to each of his constituents. He told Philippine legislators that their nation was in grave danger; he told Quezón that he doubted the Japanese were dangerous; and he told his staff to accelerate their efforts to recruit and equip Filipinos. Meanwhile, he told Washington that he needed more money to fend off a threat that, he confidently announced to his staff, wasn’t really a threat at all. What did MacArthur really want? He had two goals: His first one was to convince Filipinos that they could create a military strong enough to deter any aggressor. Second, he wanted to convince the Japanese that the price they would pay for an invasion would prove too costly. As events would show, he failed at both.

MacArthur’s hopes were simply hopes. The archipelago couldn’t rely on its own legislature, much less the American Congress, to provide funding for an army. “Though we worked doggedly,” Eisenhower later reflected, “ours was a hopeless venture, in a sense. The Philippine government simply could not afford to build real security from attack.” MacArthur agreed, though he continued to contend that the Philippines would be a match for any invading enemy. He told this to Quezón, to the Philippine national assembly, and to visiting dignitaries. No one believed him. One day, as Eisenhower listened in astonishment, MacArthur told a group of reporters that the Philippines could not be conquered, that any amphibious assault on it would be too risky, and that, in any event, Japan didn’t really covet the Philippines. There were seven thousand islands in the archipelago, he argued, and they could all be defended: “We’re going to make it so very expensive for any nation to attack these islands that no nation will try it.” Eisenhower was aghast. It was as if his boss hadn’t even read the newspapers. “I do not agree with those who predict an imminent war,” MacArthur told a group of visiting American dignitaries. “The complete state of preparedness of practically all nations is the surest preventive of war.”

The claim seems odd, particularly given MacArthur’s pleas for more funds. After returning from Washington, he had trooped off to the Malacanang Palace to ask Quezón to make one last appeal to the Philippine legislature for money. Quezón resisted him because, as he said, the Philippine treasury was empty. But MacArthur pressed him—Quezón
had to try. Eventually, Quezón relented and appeared before the legislators, couching his argument in typical Quezón-like legalese: “The annual appropriations will be adjusted each year to the annual revenue, so that all other authorized government services and activities may develop in harmony with the growth of the populations and the expansion of our culture.” This gibberish fell on deaf ears. Most of the legislators thought Quezón and MacArthur were simply out of touch: The best way to keep the Philippines from becoming a Japanese target was to refrain from appearing too inviting, they said—which meant that less money should be appropriated for the military, not more. Of course, the legislators should have known better. That month, July 1937, Japanese and Chinese forces clashed at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing—an incident that sparked a full-scale war in China. Within months, Japanese aggression would account for tens of thousands of Chinese lives.