When the Marshalls left the Infantry School in 1932, seventeen million Americans, nearly 20 percent of the workforce, were unemployed. The stock market crash of 1929 had precipitated the Great Depression, which was to last the remainder of the decade. People were begging in the streets of large cities and millions, unable to find work, were on the move in tent cities across the country. The army too felt the pinch; appropriations were frozen, as well as salaries, and personnel, including the officer corps, were cut back.
Into this unfortunate state of affairs plunged the newly married George C. Marshall as commanding officer of a battalion of the U.S. Eighth Infantry Regiment stationed at Tybee Island, Georgia, seventeen miles south of Savannah. It was only a four-hundred-man outfit, but Marshall was glad for the opportunity to once again have a fighting infantry command. The post was a small one so he also served as post commander, with duties that extended to the civilian community in Savannah, a lovely but sleepy town that seemed a throwback in time.
No sooner had Marshall arrived than he was notified that his unit would be responsible for training a recent creation of the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his Democratic Congress called the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The New Deal measure would employ hundreds of thousands of young men in flood and soil erosion control by planting trees and grasses, building dams, bridges, and campgrounds, and other methods to be mapped out by the U.S. Forest Service, Conservation Service, and Army Corps of Engineers. These youths had to be organized into military-style units, the better to control them and enable them to carry out their jobs. Marshall’s quota of young men to train was seventeen hundred, but soon orders from Washington directed him to oversee nineteen of the CCC camps being built from Georgia to Florida. Marshall was charged with seeing that the young men had proper barracks, food, hygienic facilities, and direction. He loved the idea and threw himself wholeheartedly into the work, visiting and inspecting the camps regularly. If there were men who could not read or write properly he arranged for their education, and he encouraged them to learn to fish and swim and play team sports.
In 1933, Marshall was promoted to full colonel and sent to command the Eighth Infantry Regiment at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, near Charleston. As the Depression deepened it took a harsh toll on the enlisted personnel, especially if they had families. Marshall arranged for the mess to fix lunch boxes with hot meals that the men could take home to their families for ten cents a day. He and Katherine also ate these midday dinners “until the custom was well-established,” she said. “It saved the wives endless toil and was a godsend to the married enlisted personnel.”1 He also continued his work with the CCC camps, which he called “the greatest social experiment outside of Russia.”*
No sooner, it seemed, had the Marshalls settled in at Fort Moultrie than the new bird colonel received a severe blow from the War Department. He was to leave immediately for Chicago, and there become chief instructor for the 33rd Division—a National Guard outfit. Marshall saw it as a demotion and a dead end and asked Pershing to write Douglas MacArthur, who was then chief of staff of the army. MacArthur affirmed the orders. What Marshall didn’t know was that MacArthur had in fact handpicked Marshall for the duty, which he knew was somewhat onerous. As Marshall might have—and should have—expected, politics was involved.
It seems that the 33rd Division’s commander, Major General Roy D. Keehn, a prominent Democrat and lawyer for William Randolph Hearst, was smarting from accusations in “Colonel” Robert R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune that the division was in such a poor state of affairs it would be incapable of dealing with anticipated labor strikes and civil disorders in Illinois. McCormick was, of course, a prominent Republican and his paper made a point of attacking the Roosevelt administration. At Keehn’s request MacArthur had specifically selected George Marshall to shape up the 33rd and end McCormick’s attacks.
Unaware of all this, Marshall became despondent. Katherine wrote: “George had a gray, drawn look which I had never seen before, and have seldom seen since.” He told visiting Rose Page, who had asked when Marshall would become a general and then chief of staff, “Rosie, it looks now as if I never will. If I don’t make brigadier general soon, I’ll be so far behind in seniority I won’t even be in the running.”2
Chicago was a dull, dingy Depression-era city with half its working population unemployed. Marshall as usual worked hard—and successfully—to bring the 33rd Division up to par, while Katherine shopped at antiques auctions, of which there were many given the state of economic affairs. Worried that time was running out on him because of age, Marshall implored his old friend Pershing to write a letter to the War Department urging his promotion. Instead, Pershing did him one better—he went personally to the president of the United States.
On May 24, 1935, Secretary of War George Dern received a note from the White House.
General Pershing asks very strongly that Colonel George C. Marshall (Infantry) shall be promoted to brigadier.
Can we put him on the list of next promotions? He is fifty-four years old.
F.D.R.
On October 1, 1936, Marshall at last got his star and was assigned to command the Fifth Infantry Brigade at Vancouver Barracks, Washington. It was the deep boondocks but Marshall didn’t care. He had a fighting command once more.
AFTER FOURTEEN YEARS AS A MAJOR, George Patton was at last promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1934. That same year, his daughter Bee was married to Lieutenant John Knight Waters, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and future four-star general. Patton had taken her to West Point five years earlier, for his twentieth reunion, and asked the authorities to provide a suitable escort and the authorities had produced Waters, whom they considered “the most outstanding cadet at the Academy.”
The wedding, which took place in the same church where Patton and Beatrice were married twenty-four years earlier, was a great social event. Bee wore the same wedding dress her mother had worn in 1910 (and the one her grandmother had first worn in 1884). Patton too looked dazzling, sporting his dress blues bedecked with medals. Photographs in the society sections of the newspapers show him smiling contentedly, although daughter Ruth Ellen had a different take. She would never forget her father’s face, she said, as he walked Bee down the aisle. “He looked just like a child who is having his favorite toy taken away. All his determination to remain forever young was being undermined by having a daughter getting married. He was forty-nine years old and he had still not won a war or kept his part of the bargain with Grandfer Ayer about winning glory. He looked stricken to the heart.”
For his part, Patton wrote to Beatrice, “No mother of a bride ever looked better or cried less.”3
The following spring Patton was again ordered to Hawaii and, to celebrate the occasion, he bought a fifty-foot schooner. Named Arcturus, the boat was shipped to Patton by rail, from the East Coast to San Diego. He intended to sail solo across the Pacific to the Hawaiian Islands—despite the fact that he knew little or nothing about ocean navigating, telling Beatrice that he’d “rather be dead than be nobody.”
Of course, in 1935, there weren’t GPS or any other sort of electronic navigation system; getting from one place to another in the vast and trackless wastes of the Pacific was done by celestial navigation using charts, sextant, and chronometer. Patton therefore enrolled in a course in celestial navigation taught at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, which he drove to from Washington three times a week.
Beatrice immediately announced, according to Ruth Ellen, that “she would not let George drown without her,” and so she enlisted as the ship’s cook despite the fact that she had never cooked in her life. By the time they cast off, the crew had grown to six, including friends, cousins, and a Norwegian seaman who had come with the boat. As they pulled away from the dock on a May morning, Patton looked forlornly at the varnished boxes containing the sextant and chronometer and remarked to Beatrice, “We can learn, can’t we?”4
They arrived, somehow, fifteen days and 2,238 miles later, to be greeted at the dock in Honolulu by a brass band and a bevy of hula dancers courtesy of their many friends on the island. Quickly, Patton was made the G-2, or chief intelligence officer, for the Hawaiian Department, but his superior General Hugh Drum, a rather square man who secretly envied Patton’s financial and social superiority, refused to back him up in the “things he discovered about the Japanese underground” and other nefarious activities that would ultimately lead to Pearl Harbor.
An all-expenses-paid two and a half years in Hawaii with your family might be a wondrous pipe dream for most, but in Patton’s case he was “miserable,” according to biographer D’Este and Patton’s daughter Ruth Ellen. He loved Hawaiian life but he was frustrated by lack of promotion and the fact that he was now in his fifties without yet having discovered the end of the rainbow. He was drinking too much, Ruth Ellen noted—not more than usual, but too much “after a bad fall in polo [that] affected his drinking capacity for the rest of his life.” Not only that, he was angry about growing old, and he began seeking the company of younger people including “the eternal harpies who are always standing in the wings of successful marriages hoping the wife will falter and the man will be there for them to feast on.”5
Among these latter, unfortunately for everyone concerned, was twenty-one-year-old Jean Gordon, daughter of Beatrice’s half sister Louise, who came visiting from Boston on her way to a tour of Japan and the Far East. An educated, good-looking young woman, she “made a play” for Patton.6
Beatrice seemed unaware of the affair until her husband and niece returned from several unchaperoned days on another Hawaiian island. While Patton was there on official business, the affection between the two upon their homecoming was too apparent to ignore.
A “powerful tension” then descended upon the Patton family, lasting until Jean’s departure several days hence, when Beatrice turned to Ruth Ellen as Jean’s ship was pulling away from the pier—and as Patton was “making a damned fool of himself” waving furiously at Jean—and delivered herself of one of the sagest, bravest, most selfless and eloquent lectures in the history of marriage. “You know,” she told her daughter, “it’s lucky for us that I don’t have a mother because if I did I’d pack up and go to her now; and your father needs me. He doesn’t know it, but he needs me. In fact, right now he needs me more than I need him.”7
The infidelity had coincided with the publication of a novel—Blood of the Shark—that Beatrice had been putting the finishing touches on since their last posting in Hawaii in 1928. Such as it was, Patton’s behavior had also cruelly “stolen her moment,” as Beatrice explained to Ruth Ellen: “I want you to remember this; that even the best and truest men can be be-dazzled and make fools of themselves. So, if your husband ever does this to you, you can remember that I didn’t leave your father. I stuck with him because I am all that he really has, and I love him, and he loves me.”8
ABOARD THE FAR EAST LINER President Harding with Douglas MacArthur was Jean Faircloth, thirty-seven, a zesty, attractive, five-foot-two, green-eyed heiress from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, whose grandfather, a Confederate captain, had fought against Arthur MacArthur at the Battle of Missionary Ridge. She had planned to visit friends in Shanghai before concluding a world tour, but revised her itinerary to take a suite in the Manila Hotel, which was also Douglas MacArthur’s abode. The two had met at a cocktail party thrown by the ship’s captain and were inseparable thereafter.
MacArthur had brought his eighty-six-year-old mother, Pinky, on board the ship but she was ill and remained in her cabin. Once in Manila he installed her in the hotel’s penthouse suite next to his, but her condition worsened and within a month she was dead of cerebral thrombosis. It was an enormous blow to MacArthur, who had been extraordinarily close to her through the years—even to the extent that, when he was chief of staff, he would ride from his Washington office every day to Fort Myer to have lunch with her. He would carry her remains with him on his next trip to the States and bury her in the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.
MacArthur grieved for months, but Jean Faircloth was a decided help. The two of them would go to the movies five or six nights a week, arriving for the 8:30 showing at one of Manila’s many English-language theaters. Otherwise, MacArthur spent much of his time in the Philippines reading while sitting in his mahogany-paneled library in his six-room suite at the Manila. The library, like the rest of the suite, was palatial, with large maroon-colored leather chairs and an exquisite fifteen-foot Japanese bamboo table. In the spacious dining room, which featured a large Philippine mahogany table, MacArthur had his mother’s early American silver on prominent display.
There were two long tiled balconies that overlooked Manila Bay, one with a breathtaking view of “The Rock,” Corregidor, rising from the ocean, with the Bataan Peninsula as a backdrop. MacArthur would pace here for long periods, thinking. As biographer William Manchester tells it, pacing was MacArthur’s form of exercise. He was going on sixty years old and was reasonably fit except for a slightly protruding belly. According to Manchester, he paced for miles each day in his office and in his suite.
James Gavin, then a young officer and soon-to-be four-star general, remembered the day MacArthur came “visiting us at Fort McKinley on Luzon to watch some test firings of a new 81mm mortar. We were observing mortar fire from the high ground when he strode up in a rather imperious way. There was an aura about him that seemed to keep us junior officers at a distance. He was impressive and, in his own way, inspired great confidence and tremendous respect. We knew him by reputation to be a man of great physical courage, and by professional behavior to be a man of vision, intelligence, and great moral courage.”9
One of MacArthur’s first actions in building up Philippine defenses was the acquisition of fifty sixty-five-foot torpedo boats known as PT boats, based on a British-made model. Unfortunately, the British had to cancel most of the order when war with Germany was declared. (Thus, only nine PT boats were available when the Japanese finally attacked on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.)
MacArthur’s most important element of defense for the islands was a ten-year program to train 40,000 men a year as soldiers so that by the end of a decade he would have, at his disposal, a Philippine army of 400,000 divided into forty 10,000-man divisions scattered around the archipelago. Their training would be by a cadre of regular Philippine soldiers led by officers graduated from the country’s military academy that was modeled on West Point. “We are going to make it so very expensive for any nation to attack these islands that no nation will try it,” MacArthur told Collier’s magazine. He said it would cost the Japanese half a million men, three years, and a billion dollars to take the Philippines—a price they would not be willing to pay.10
They soon learned, however, that the principal enemy was lack of money. The United States, still suffering the Depression, would not appropriate nearly enough to fund such a force, and “the Philippine government simply could not afford to build real security from attack,” according to Dwight Eisenhower, who had come along to be MacArthur’s chief of staff (“My best clerk,” MacArthur called him).
As it turned out, the vaunted Philippine army that MacArthur was building wasn’t measuring up either. Armed with ancient World War I Enfield rifles and clad in sneakers and pith helmets, their training progressed in fits and starts and many of the locals evaded conscription because, among other things, the Filipino soldiers were paid only $7 a month compared with $30 for a U.S. private. Worse, Quezon, who was now president of the Philippine Commonwealth, had turned against his old friend and was threatening to abolish MacArthur’s ten-year plan, believing it might become a provocation to Japan.
Even with the setbacks, in the summer of 1937 the Philippine government made MacArthur a field marshal, the highest rank in its army. For the occasion, he had designed a uniform consisting of a white tunic, black pants, and a cap with the gold-braided “scrambled eggs” of a high-ranking field officer on the bill. Some historians have suggested that the uniform was ostentatious, or “Ruritanian,” but in fairness it closely resembled the U.S. Army’s regulation dress whites.
THAT SAME YEAR MACARTHUR MARRIED Jean Faircloth in a simple ceremony at New York’s city hall, following a disappointing visit to Washington, where the War Department turned down nearly all of his requests for military supplies, which were becoming increasingly urgent considering what was happening in Europe.
There, Hitler had seized absolute power and Germany was threatening her neighbors; Japan had invaded China. It was apparent to most knowledgeable observers that there would be no ten years’ time to prepare for an invasion. The Philippines stood squarely in the way of the Japanese path to the wealth of the East Indies, which contained the oil, tin, rubber, quinine, and other raw materials desperately needed by Imperial Nippon. Observers in the northernmost of the Philippine archipelago daily could see the aerial maneuvers of Japanese warplanes based on an island the Japanese occupied barely forty miles away. Time was running out for General MacArthur and his Philippine army.
UPON HIS ARRIVAL AT VANCOUVER BARRACKS, Marshall wrote to General Keehn in Chicago, telling him of the historic nature of his new post. His quarters, for instance, had been occupied at one time or another by a “succession of Civil War celebrities or Indian fighters,” including Generals Nelson Miles, Edward R. Canby, George Crook, John Gibbon, and John Pope. The parade ground, in the shadow of Mount Hood, was surrounded by giant fir trees and bordered the Columbia River, which “emerges from its famous gorge a few miles above the post.” There was excellent salmon fishing and pheasant hunting in the vicinity, as well as skiing on Mount Hood.11
In addition to his duties with the Fifth Brigade, Marshall also had thirty-five CCC camps scattered throughout Oregon and southern Washington. At one point, in June of 1937, he gained the national spotlight when a Russian plane intending to fly nonstop from Moscow to San Francisco was forced to put down in Vancouver. There was a great press clamor to interview the crew but Marshall declared that no interviews would be conducted until the Soviet pilots got some sleep. After lending the Russians his own sets of pajamas, Marshall then offered a fancy breakfast table for the fliers and invited the reporters in; as well, he brought the Russian ambassador, who had been awaiting the flight in San Francisco, up to Vancouver and gave him a presentation sword to honor the occasion, which elicited a “warm thanks” from the ambassador.
All of this was duly noted by the State Department, the American public, and the General Staff of the Army back in the capital. Marshall’s earliest biographer, William Frye, notes that there was “strong evidence,” but “no clear proof,” that it was at about this point in Marshall’s career that decisions had been made to bring him to Washington, D.C., as the successor to the chief of staff. If that were so, Marshall certainly had no idea of it, but he continued to distinguish himself as commander of the Fifth Brigade and overseer of the CCC camps.
BY 1937 THE DEMOCRACIES RECOILED as Adolf Hitler firmly ensconced himself and his Nazi party as brutal regulators of German society. It was one of several dictatorships that ultimately sought to divide and control large parts of the world.
Following World War I, the victorious Allies had set up an organization they hoped would prevent future conflicts. Called the League of Nations, it was envisioned as a body that would not only mediate international disputes but settle them, if necessary, by force of arms. Almost immediately things began to go wrong. Principally isolationist sentiment in the United States caused the U.S. Senate to reject the idea of a “world government,” and thus the most powerful nation on earth at the time would not lend its considerable teeth to a multinational plan for stopping wars before they got out of hand.
Throughout the 1920s and ’30s American military might was dismantled in favor of domestic programs, the more so following the onset of the Great Depression. During this period American leftists, socialists, pacifists, and isolationists loudly denounced munitions makers and financiers such as J. P. Morgan for being responsible for all the misery caused by the recent war, and most American citizens assumed the attitude that “Europe’s problems were Europe’s problems.”12 This outlook was so pervasive that a measure known as the Kellogg-Briand peace pact was passed by the U.S. Congress, Britain, France, and other nations—including Germany, which actually outlawed war, and contained about as much authority as outlawing thunderstorms.
All of this played greatly into Hitler’s and the other dictators’ hands: decadent, idealistic, foolish democracies, thinking they could vote out war. Hitler made his first move in 1936, marching into the Rhineland, which had been set up as a buffer zone between Germany and France, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Neither the French nor the British did anything but protest to the League of Nations, which also did nothing. Hitler made numerous sham speeches intended for international consumption in which he stated, “We have no territorial intentions in Europe … Germany will never break the peace,” and similar words to that effect.
Next the Nazis marched into Austria, claiming it had always been a Germanic province. The Western Allies merely watched. It was a continuing pattern of Hitler’s: claiming he desired no territory but then seizing it. Soon it became Czechoslovakia’s turn, on the pretext that there were German citizens living among the Czechs in an area known as the Sudetenland who wished to return to the fatherland. By then France and Britain were thoroughly alarmed. A permanent peace was sought by sending the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, to meet Hitler in Munich and draw up some binding accord. It was a fiasco. When the tall, umbrella-carrying, bowler-hatted Chamberlain returned to London he waved a Hitler-signed document and proclaimed, “This means peace in our time.”
It meant no such thing. Among the leaders of Great Britain only Winston Churchill fully understood the machinations of Hitler. “The government had to choose between shame and war,” he thundered. “They have chosen shame, and now they will get war.” Barely six months later, in March 1939, German storm troopers annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia, including its large armaments factories at Skoda and elsewhere.
In August 1939 Hitler negotiated one of the most breathtaking diplomatic coups in history—a ten-year “nonaggression” treaty with the Soviet Union, thus making an ally out of his most powerful archenemy. This shocking news completely flummoxed Western Communists and their fellow travelers, who for years had been warned of the dangers of fascism. Now the Communist Daily Worker began preaching that Hitler and the Nazis were their friends.
Meanwhile, across the Pacific, the Empire of Japan had for a long time been flexing its muscles. In 1853 the American commodore Matthew C. Perry had steamed his squadron of sleek, black-hulled warships into Tokyo Bay, opening relations with the island kingdom of Japan, which had been the most remote civilized nation on earth.
Some months later Perry returned with a full U.S. fleet bearing champagne, modern tools, women’s clothing, a telegraph, guns, pictures of New York City, and an English-language dictionary and sailed “triumphantly home having brought a mighty empire into the family of nations without bloodshed.”13
Perry’s feat set off a chain of events, which, fifty years into the future, changed the world, as Japan incorporated Western science, culture, and military technology into its burgeoning economic system. The Japanese began purchasing large warships from the British, whose naval officers trained Japanese sailors, just as German officers were hired to train its army. In 1894 Japan set out to become an imperial power by invading Korea as well as Manchuria and the great Chinese island of Formosa.
This alarmed the Russians, who ran the Japanese out of Manchuria and took it for themselves. But the Japanese were not done. In a chilling parallel to the Pearl Harbor raid in 1941, Japan in 1904 launched a sneak torpedo attack at Port Arthur that annihilated Russia’s Oriental Fleet, including two of the czar’s largest battleships, only afterward bothering to declare war. Land fighting continued, with the Japanese getting the better of it, inflicting a hundred thousand casualties on the Russians at the Battle of Mukden.
The shocked Russians sent their much larger Baltic Fleet halfway around the world only to fall victim to the worst naval defeat in modern history. Twenty Russian warships, including four new battleships, were surprised and sunk by the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima Strait, and seven other Russian battleships shamefully struck their colors and were captured. Between four thousand and six thousand of the czar’s sailors perished in the action and the world awakened to the fact that Japan was a major international power.
The Russo-Japanese War also unleashed the first wave of anti-American sentiment in the nationalistic Japanese empire. Since its victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898 the United States had come to acquire vast properties in the far eastern Pacific, including Wake, Guam, and Midway islands, as well as the enormous archipelago of the Philippines. All of these properties lay in what the Japanese regarded as their “sphere of influence,” and American diplomats, including Douglas MacArthur’s father, Arthur MacArthur, were even then privately warning that the emperor’s military was casting a hungry eye upon these remote possessions.
Theodore Roosevelt, whose slogan was “speak softly and carry a big stick,” decided to roll out the big stick for the Japanese in the form of a “goodwill” cruise by all sixteen battleships of the U.S. Navy, painted white to signify friendship. In fact, it was a supreme example of gunboat diplomacy. On October 18, 1908, this armada arrived in Yokohama, where it was greeted by cheering throngs of Japanese who showered the American sailors with gifts.
This was in direct contrast to recent charges of anti-Japanese racism in the United States. Japanese had begun immigrating to America—in particular to the West Coast—in large enough numbers to alarm many who termed the flood the “Yellow Peril,” a phrase popularized by newspapers of the period. The San Francisco Board of Education in 1906 had ordered Japanese children to be segregated from the whites, and West Coast workers began rioting and attacking Japanese immigrants who, they claimed, were working for “coolie wages,” thus putting them out of jobs. The California legislature passed a resolution that referred to the immigrants as “immoral, intemperate [and] quarrelsome.”
All of this created a great stir in the Japanese Diet (parliament), where there was talk of declaring war on the United States, a suggestion echoed by reactionary newspapers in Tokyo. Meanwhile, the Japanese increased their orders of warships from Europe, including dreadnought-class battleships.
The arrival of the Great White Fleet, as if by magic, seemed to sweep away these animosities, but at least one of the American sailors, a young naval ensign and recent graduate of Annapolis named William F. Halsey, wasn’t buying it. Destined for fame as a U.S. Pacific Fleet commander in World War II, “Bull” Halsey recalled, “I felt that the Japanese meant none of their welcome; that they actually disliked us. Nor was I convinced when they presented us with medals confirming the ‘good will’ between our two governments.”14
Halsey’s premonitions were sadly borne out as Japanese-American relations slowly soured over the next three decades. Beginning in the 1920s, a rise in murderous militarism swept Japan so that by the 1930s it was said to be ruled under a “government by assassination.” Japan repudiated an international naval armament limitation treaty of 1924 and, in 1931, once again invaded Manchuria, bringing on war with China. There commenced riots and beatings of Caucasians in Japanese cities, often “within sight of the police,” after the U.S. Congress passed an immigrant exclusion act that forbade Chinese as well as Japanese from settling on American soil. In 1932 Japan walked out of the League of Nations.
The Japanese war with China ground on with nightmare slowness and brutality. In 1937, the Japanese exacted what came to be known as the Rape of Nanking—a bloody six-week orgy of almost unimaginable savagery on the peaceful Chinese metropolis. International newspapers and newsreels recorded the deaths of some 300,000 helpless citizens, most of them women and children, who were murdered in the most unspeakable ways. The city was burned and people were thrown into the flames. They were roasted alive or buried alive in pits. Infants were torn limb from limb. More than 80,000 women and children, ranging from eight to eighty years old, were raped by Japanese soldiers. People were speared on bayonets or thrown headlong into wells. Beheadings were so common that they were held on a contest-level basis to see which Japanese army unit could perform the most.
This reign of cruelty was so abominable that people still writhe at the telling of it; the world, of course, was shocked and horrified but did nothing. Even as the films, photographs, and news stories came back to the Western world, the Japanese claimed they were exaggerated. Later investigations proved that, if anything, the barbarity was underreported. The Japanese army was then two million strong, about fifteen times larger than the army of the United States. It was apparent that the Japanese intended a conquest of the entire Far East but no one knew when or how it would begin.
As this ghastly situation unfolded, George C. Marshall was abruptly pitchforked onto the world stage.
WHILE HIS HOME LIFE WAS TUMULTUOUS, Patton still managed to produce a paper for circulation among key officers that was eerily prescient regarding a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Patton’s suspicions about the Japanese began during his earlier tour in Hawaii and became amplified as the Imperial Japanese Army began to invade and conquer her Asian neighbors and establish hegemony over far-flung Pacific islands upon which they built air and naval bases. Entitled “Surprise,” Patton’s paper theorized that the Japanese, “during a profound period of peace,” would sneak aircraft carriers and an invasion force to within two hundred miles of Oahu and launch aerial attacks on U.S. military installations before landing troops. Japanese submarines, he predicted, would be lurking around the entrance to Pearl Harbor to sink any ship that attempted to escape. Also prescient was Patton’s plan for the incarceration of all Japanese in the Hawaiian Islands—including those who had become American citizens—at the opening of hostilities. Only four and a half years later, President Roosevelt’s controversial executive order relocated millions of Japanese from the West Coast of the United States.15
While the army seriously considered Patton’s warnings, its present state of affairs did not allow for much reaction, and in June 1937 Patton sailed the Arcturus from Honolulu back to California for reassignment on the board of the Cavalry School at Fort Riley. The crew this time consisted of Beatrice, young George, Francis “Doc” Graves, a cook named Suzuiki, and the Norwegian deckhand, who had originally come with the boat. With light westerly winds they made the voyage in just one day short of a month, nearly twice the time of coming over. Once on shore Patton sold the boat but vowed to get another when he reached the East Coast.
Before he had that chance, however, Patton was riding with Beatrice on the Myopia Hunt course when he did the thing he had so often warned about in the summer bluebottle fly season. He allowed the head of his horse to come even with the stirrups of Beatrice’s horse, a position that put his leg right behind the other horse. When a horse is fly bitten it will often kick, and Beatrice’s did, causing compound fractures of Patton’s right tibia and fibula, which cracked with the sound of a pistol shot.
While the injury put him out of business for nearly six months, Patton was promoted to colonel in July of 1938 and sent to Fort Clark near San Antonio to command the Fifth U.S. Cavalry Regiment. He was to take his place in the ongoing war games staged by the Third U.S. Army, which were designed to test concepts of troop mobility. By then Patton had become a full exponent of mechanizing the cavalry—not only armored cars and mechanized machine-gun carriages but tanks as well.
Fort Clark was in wild country, much the same as when Patton had been on the Mexican border with Pershing against Pancho Villa. It had a great restorative effect on Patton, who not only was back in a combat command position but could hunt and fish and ride wherever he damn well pleased. His letters from this time are full of satisfaction, hope, and praise and he made solid friendships among the high-ranking officers on the post.
After only four months, however, Patton was ordered back to Washington to take command of the Third U.S. Cavalry Regiment at Fort Myer. Waiting for him was all the spit and polish of its ceremonial duties, as well as the “Society Circus,” which had been going strong ever since Patton had organized it many years earlier. The reason for the transfer, according to Patton biographer Martin Blumenson, was that a man of Patton’s wealth and social connections was needed as the present commander of the unit. Brigadier General Jonathan Wainwright had driven himself into debt trying to keep up with the constant social swirl on an army officer’s salary.
This time, in addition to conducting funerals of prominent people at Arlington, Patton’s command escorted many political dignitaries, including the president of Nicaragua and the king and queen of England, who arrived for a visit to Washington in 1939. In between throwing fashionable parties for Washington’s high and mighty, in June of that year Patton and Beatrice bought an eighty-foot, two-masted schooner, the When and If, which they sailed down from Massachusetts into the Chesapeake Bay and up the Potomac to the Capital Yacht Club in Washington, D.C.
Of course, the vast majority of enlisted soldiers could not live like that, and by mid-month most had run out of money to spend. Curiously, about that same time, Patton’s dog would “mysteriously disappear at the same time each month,” and he would post a reward notice in the stables offering $2 (about $30 in today’s money) for the return of the dog. Invariably the dog would turn up and some “lucky” trooper would collect his reward.16
By then, Patton’s friend George Marshall had become the army’s chief of staff and was “batching it” with Patton in Patton’s quarters at Fort Myer. It was a temporary stay while the chief of staff’s sumptuous house was being renovated. Beatrice and the children were in the country at Green Meadows and Katherine Marshall was visiting friends. This gave Patton a chance to curry favor with Marshall for other high-ranking officers not so conveniently located.
And while he was at it, he did the same for himself; when, for instance, Marshall was made a four-star general as chief of staff, Patton presented him a pair of sterling silver stars (eight stars in all) that he had commissioned from a New York jeweler. The army in those days was small and the scheming for promotion among officers resembled, at times, intrigues from the bewildering days of the Borgias. On July 29, 1939, Patton confided to Beatrice that Marshall “is just like an old shoe. Last night he was dining out and instead of having a chauffeur he drove himself! He is going out in the boat with me today [a Saturday]. He does not seem to have many friends.”17
ON FEBRUARY 21, 1938, Jean MacArthur presented her husband with a seven pound, eight ounce boy who was christened Arthur MacArthur IV. He was tended to by Jean and a Cantonese nurse named Ah Cheu, and quickly the boy became the light of the general’s life. The baby soon learned to walk, and before long MacArthur had created a morning ritual of martial bearing. When young Arthur would toddle into the couple’s bedroom about 7 a.m., MacArthur would spring out of bed and come to attention. Then they would parade around the bedroom with the field marshal of the Philippines making the sound of drums until he burst into song, usually those from the turn of the twentieth century, which he taught to Arthur IV so the two of them could sing duets.
The birth of the child had a profound effect on Douglas MacArthur, who was going on sixty but looked and now acted twenty years younger. Practically everyone who knew him commented on this.
Unfortunately, by then, MacArthur had created a number of powerful enemies in Washington, including the new chief of staff Malin Craig, who resented MacArthur’s prominence in the press and ordered him to return to duty in the United States. Soon after, the field marshal of the Philippines resigned from the U.S. Army, while numerous members of Congress simply wanted the army to withdraw from the Western Pacific and make the Hawaiian Islands the extent of U.S. influence in that ocean. But MacArthur always had President Roosevelt, who repeatedly called him “our greatest general” (though he told him privately, to his face, that he would be “our worst politician”). And Roosevelt trumped everyone.
MacArthur and Quezon continued to be “estranged,” with the president of the Philippines now publicly suggesting that the islands were indefensible. MacArthur was irate not only with Quezon but with the politicians in Washington, who continued to refuse to send any arms and had put the islands on a low defensive priority.
Another loss came when war broke out in Europe on September 1, 1939, and Eisenhower, now a lieutenant colonel, asked to be released and sent back to the States, where he hoped to receive a combat command. MacArthur graciously let him go, and as his replacement he selected Lieutenant Colonel Richard K. “Dick” Sutherland, a gloomy, unctuous Yale graduate, whose father was a retired U.S. senator. Sutherland had some strange political views that didn’t sit well with MacArthur, and one night, at dinner, MacArthur set him straight. Sutherland told the general and several other officers that democracy should be abolished in wartime, that Congress wasted too much time arguing. Elections, he asserted, ought to be eliminated in favor of a presidential dictatorship.
“No Dick, you are wrong,” MacArthur told him. “Democracy as we have it in the United States is the best form of government that man has ever evolved.” When people have freedom of speech and thought, MacArthur continued, they will keep their minds flexible and progressive. But, he said, in a dictator state freedom disappears and people’s minds become rigid and regimented—“especially in time of war.” Then, the general concluded, “something always goes wrong in the dictator’s plan and the free-thinking people will defeat him.”
“The trouble with you, Dick, I’m afraid,” MacArthur summed up, “is that you forget that we fight for the ideals and principles of democracy.” Thus ended the lesson for MacArthur’s chief of staff, and nothing more was said of it because Sutherland was just the kind of officer MacArthur wanted for his second in command—crafty, obedient, and ruthless.18
* At its height, the CCC would employ 2.5 million youths.