The Yanks Are Coming! (17 page)

By October 1916 he was again at Fort Bliss, a full colonel now in command of an artillery regiment. Sharply martial in appearance, March was regarded as brilliant, direct, laconic, decisive, fair, and reserved. He trained his men very much with a mind that war was imminent—and it was not the ongoing skirmish in Mexico that dominated his thinking; it was the war in Europe. After the United States declared war on imperial Germany in April 1917, March expected to see summer in France. He did, as commander of a brigade of artillery.

“THE RIGHT MAN IN THE RIGHT PLACE”

By September he was a major general and chief of artillery for the American Expeditionary Force. Even so, he insisted on joining the gunners on the artillery range. But his days in the field were numbered. In February 1918, Secretary of War Newton Baker announced he had chosen March to become Army chief of staff.
⁵
Baker had long admired March as an efficient man of military business—just the sort he needed to expedite the training, deployment, and supply of the rapidly expanding AEF. Indeed, March believed that “entirely too much time was spent on the training considered necessary by General Pershing.”
⁶
He wanted men in the field now.

He also wanted Army administrators working with the same dedication as field officers in combat. When March arrived, he found that the general staff worked normal business hours. That changed. There was a war to be won, and the general staff would work round
the clock until it was. His sense of duty was stringent. His eldest son, an Army aviator, had died in February after a plane crash.
⁷
As with his wife's death, March was stoical; he became even more dedicated to his work.

It was clear Baker had chosen the right man—even if March himself deeply regretted being trapped behind a desk in Washington. When Baker asked him if he had received his promotion as chief of staff with “mixed emotions,” March replied, “No, Mr. Secretary, it made me sick at my stomach.”
⁸
Still, Baker was well satisfied that in March he had a man who was a remarkably quick study, astute, and effective as an administrator. Indeed, within a matter of weeks March had doubled the monthly totals of doughboys crossing the Atlantic—and then doubled them again. If the price Baker had to pay for March's efficiency was the bruised feelings of others—including Pershing, senior to March in rank, but in March's view a mere leader of the American Expeditionary Force under the Army chief of staff—it was a small price to pay for the results achieved.
⁹

March's dedication to victory could not be doubted. He was going to provide the American Expeditionary Force with every bit of manpower he could muster—no matter the cost. “We are going to win this war if it takes every man in the United States.”
¹⁰
And he was not one for compromises. He wanted everything done well and fast. He wanted his briefings to the point. His questions were terse and penetrating. He wasted no time in micromanagement either, assuming that every man knew his job and should do it unhindered. Inefficiency was the enemy he slew—and kept slaying—in the War Department. Few liked him, most respected him, some hated him—though he counted the haters as a badge of honor: it meant he had crunched the toes of useless bureaucrats beneath his boots.
¹¹
March gave shape to the general staff and to the wartime U.S. Army, successfully merging the Army
and the National Guard and creating new branches of the service covering the Air Corps, Transport Corps, Tank Corps, and Chemical Warfare Corps. Financier and presidential advisor Bernard Baruch told March's biographer that March was “the right man in the right place.”
¹²
It is hard to gainsay that.

THE DEMOBILIZATION AND THE NEXT WAR

Having built the Army up, in victory he had to take it down—and while March was advised by progressives and economists to demobilize according to the needs of industry, he decided that the best and fairest way to demobilize was in terms of military units, with the easiest (those still stateside) disbanding first, though a few exceptions were made for men in vital industries (such as coal miners). Within ten months, more than three and a quarter million men had been mustered out of the service. To March, it was a point of pride that it had all gone so smoothly. To many of those in uniform, however, ten months was ten months too long. March made more enemies by taking responsibility for demoting generals, of whom there was an inevitable surplus. He made even more enemies when he ordered a reform of the West Point curriculum—he wanted the education it offered to be simultaneously broadened and tightened into a three-year course—and appointed a young general, Douglas MacArthur, to carry it out.
¹³

March initially hoped to retain a five-hundred-thousand-man Army after the war, but Congress was of no such mind. His proposal for three months of military training for all nineteen-year-old men was also a nonstarter. March believed, “You cannot run a war on tact,”
¹⁴
but his brusque ways had not only made him enemies, they had put him at odds with a postwar Congress disinclined to take orders from the Army chief of staff. Congressional feeling was on
display when the House gave a standing ovation to President Wilson's recommendation that General Pershing be elevated to four-star rank and then sat and grumbled when the president recommended four stars for General March. In the end, Congress slashed appropriations for the Army, agreeing to a standing Army of nearly three hundred thousand men but providing funding for an Army of no more than two hundred thousand, and threatened in subsequent years to cut the Army even further. March was no politician, and his plans were opposed not just by pacific congressmen but by a great many officers, including General Pershing.

In 1920, Warren G. Harding was elected president. His new secretary of war, John W. Weeks—a Naval Academy graduate and former congressman and U.S. senator from Massachusetts—initially rejected March's offer to resign. In June 1921, however, March became expendable after Weeks reorganized the War Department and made Pershing chief of staff. Though Weeks wanted to keep March employed in Washington in some capacity, the general decided to retire. He spent the next five years traveling in Europe. What started as a presumed unofficial fact-finding mission—including a cordial interview with Hindenburg—became an extended European dalliance (along with trips to Turkey and North Africa) and honeymoon, as he remarried. He returned from his travels worried about the rise of dictators and the apparent animosity of debt-ridden Europe to its creditor, the United States.

Provoked by Pershing's memoirs of the war and other accounts that he thought were factually incorrect, he waded in with his own book,
The Nation at War
, in 1932, which irritated Pershing and his camp as much Pershing's book had irritated March and his. The two generals resented what they regarded as the other's presumptions of omniscience, but March was far more openly polemical than Pershing
had been. Pershing had annoyed March by saying little; March annoyed Pershing by saying much.

In the 1930s, March foresaw the coming world war and knew the United States would have to fight Japan. He was an ardent supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt because he liked him personally, and March associated Republicans with military cuts (though the Democrats had been no better) and with his nemesis Pershing. During the Second World War, March thought air power overrated (he had always had this opinion). He believed in not messing about in North Africa, but driving directly across the English Channel into France (just as in the Great War he had argued vehemently against messing about in revolutionary Russia and for focusing all resources on the Western Front). He opposed the policy of unconditional surrender. And he was an advocate, as he had been in the First World War, of giving the American public as much information about the war as possible. He believed in exposing difficulties and in open criticism of military failures.

March was always fit, liked to play tennis and walk, and was an ardent baseball and football fan who retained his ramrod posture and good health until roughly the last two years of his life. He eventually took up residence at Walter Reed—ironically in the same rooms that had been Pershing's. He died aged ninety, remembered as a brilliant military administrator, though he would no doubt have relished Douglas MacArthur's reminder that he was also a combat soldier: “The sights and smells of a battlefield which are repugnant to many were exhilarating to him. He always wanted to go to the front.”
¹⁵
It was March's fate, however, that the front for him was most often the political battles of Washington.

CHAPTER TEN

DOUGLAS M
AC
ARTHUR (1880–1964)

O
n 25 November 1863, Lieutenant Arthur MacArthur, seizing the colors of the 24th Wisconsin from the hands of a fallen corporal, stormed Missionary Ridge, leading his men with the shout, “On Wisconsin!” and earning himself a Medal of Honor. By the end of the war, he was nineteen and a colonel, the youngest in the Army. In 1875, he proved his audacity and gallantry again when he won the hand of Mary Pinkney “Pinky” Hardy, a Southern belle of old Virginia heritage whose brothers were graduates of the Virginia Military Institute and had fought for the Confederacy. He met her in New Orleans—perhaps that helped—and they were blessed with
three sons: Arthur MacArthur III, Malcolm MacArthur (who died of measles as a young boy), and the youngest, Douglas MacArthur.

Douglas MacArthur said his earliest memories were of Army bugles and a three-hundred-mile march from Fort Wingate, New Mexico, to Fort Selden, Texas, where his father and his men were to guard the crossings of the Rio Grande against Apache raiders. MacArthur was then four years old. The frontier army that director John Ford later portrayed in his cavalry films was the army experienced by young Douglas MacArthur—or so his memory told him. When it came to movies, he always liked Westerns.
¹

DUTY AND DESTINY

There was never much doubt about Douglas MacArthur's career; he was a precocious soldier. He grew up in the saddle, rifle in hand, the son of a war hero. He spent his boyhood listening to old soldiers spin their yarns. His mother venerated Robert E. Lee and military service and instilled in her sons a sense of aristocratic honor, a catechism of duty and destiny.

After stops in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Washington, DC, the family returned to Texas, and Douglas, at age thirteen, was enrolled at the West Texas Military Academy. His father had tagged his youngest son as a likely soldier (the eldest son, Arthur III, had entered the Naval Academy), and Douglas took to the military school regimen with
élan
. A previously indifferent student, he excelled at the academy. Like Winston Churchill's at Sandhurst, MacArthur's marks soared when education had a martial cast: “Abstruse mathematics began to appear as a challenge to analysis, dull Latin and Greek seemed a gateway to the moving words of the leaders of the past, laborious historical data led to the nerve-tingling
battlefields of the great captains, Biblical lessons began to open the spiritual portals of growing faith, literature lay bare the souls of men.”
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In addition, if he did not quite excel at sports, he wanted to, and he was a gamer: a scrappy shortstop, a tough quarterback, and a somewhat awkward but school-champion-caliber tennis player. At military drill he was an acknowledged leader, and he graduated as class valedictorian.

His appointment to West Point would have seemed inevitable, but despite—or perhaps because of—the political connections of his grandfather (a judge) and his father (both Republicans), he was passed over twice for an at-large appointment (made by the president, in the first case the Democrat Grover Cleveland) and once flunked the physical (for having mild scoliosis). A friendly congressman came to the rescue, inviting MacArthur to sit the West Point entrance exam as a grandson, if not son, of Wisconsin. Douglas moved to Milwaukee with his mother and spent a year establishing residency while attending school to cram for the examination and seeing a doctor who prescribed a regimen of exercise to strengthen his back. The work paid off: MacArthur's score was far and away the best, and in due course, in 1899, he received his appointment to West Point.
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Mom went too, staying four years at a hotel near the Military Academy where she could remain his confidant while he was a cadet.

MacArthur immediately impressed his fellows as tall and dashingly handsome, with an arresting command presence, a lightning-fast brain, and a determination to excel. None of this spared him the brutal hazing that plebes then had to get through—so brutal that it killed one—and MacArthur exerted every sinew to endure it (stifling cries of pain and attempting to hide the fact that one of the ordeals had given him convulsions). When called to testify to Congress about
what had happened to him and other plebes, MacArthur conceded little about the regime's cruelty, which made him a hero to the cadets, though the system was necessarily reformed.

MacArthur graduated not only top of his class, but one of the highest-scoring cadets in the Military Academy's history, just below his mother's hero, Robert E. Lee. He was cadet captain, like Pershing, and for three of his four years at West Point played baseball—a weak-hitting but canny and determined right fielder. On graduation, he wanted a posting in the cavalry, but the Army made him an engineer. Brains like his weren't to be wasted on a horse.

After a layover in San Francisco, MacArthur was off to the Philippines, where his father had been military governor (until relieved by the new civilian governor, William Howard Taft). He had his baptism of fire—his hat took a bullet; he shot down his two would-be killers—as well as his baptism of malaria, and earned promotion to first lieutenant. After a brief return stateside, he was named aide-de-camp to his father, assisting him in an Asian
tour d'horizon
of the Far East and the Pacific, from Japan to Java, from Bangkok to the northwest frontier of the British Raj, from Singapore to Saigon and Shanghai. His father had already been a military observer of the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria, and the younger MacArthur was one of the notable few who saw America's future in the Pacific rather than in Europe or in isolation.