CHAPTER THREE

Manila Before the Storm

One of the most contentious episodes in American foreign policy occurred when the United States became involved militarily in a fragmented country in Southeast Asia and attempted to steer it on a path to democracy. Vast numbers of the local population resisted the American efforts, and many in America protested that their nation had no business being there. Political leaders in the United States were subjected to criticism in the press and in the streets. The intervention became an undeclared war in which 125,000 American troops were deployed with upwards of seven thousand casualties. This was not the 1960s, and the country was not Vietnam. Rather, it was the early 1900s, and the loosely federated country was the Philippines.

Great Britain ostensibly won the Philippines from Spain during the final round of the Seven Years’ War in 1762, but controlling the country beyond Manila and Cavite proved impossible. Britain was relieved to relinquish its tentative conquest back to Spain with the resulting peace treaty. At the time of the Spanish-American War, in 1898, Filipinos, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, were fighting Spain for their independence.

Meanwhile, “that Cuba should be free” became the American chant of the short-lived war, and in 1902, after a brief stint as an American protectorate, Cuba got its independence—however rocky the road ahead was to be. After initially allying his anti-Spanish forces with invading American troops around Manila, Aguinaldo was led to believe that the Philippines would quickly achieve the same result, and he became the leader of the First Philippine Republic. But the United States chose to view the Philippines differently from the way it viewed Cuba.

Two American presidents—William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt—decreed that the polyglot Philippines was not ready for independence and must take that road slowly. The result was a three-year war between Filipinos fighting for independence under Aguinaldo and American troops seeking to administer the Philippines as an overseas colony. This war ended soon after Aguinaldo’s capture in 1901, but guerrilla activity in the islands beyond Manila continued until 1913.

If this seems like irrelevant history, it must be remembered that Douglas MacArthur and most leaders of the American army and navy who would be his contemporaries in World War II came of age at West Point and Annapolis in the shadow of the Spanish-American War and the larger but lesser-known conflict they termed the Philippine Insurrection. American influence throughout the Pacific was increasingly important, and an American presence in the Philippines—hard-won though it turned out to be—was considered vital to those interests.

MacArthur’s first deployment to Manila, in 1903, had come just after the cessation of major hostilities, and by the time of his 1922 and 1928 postings, the country under the leadership of Manuel Quezon was slowly moving toward independence with an American governor-general but an elected Filipino legislature. In 1934, the US Congress passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act, which, upon acceptance by Filipinos, provided for a transition to commonwealth status followed by full independence in ten years. This not only raised the question of how the Philippines was to defend itself upon independence, it also raised the question of how the islands and America’s continuing interests there were to be defended during the interim. Enter Quezon’s offer of military employment to MacArthur.

As MacArthur’s tenure as chief of staff came to an end, he asked himself what was left for someone at the age of fifty-five who had no desire to see the colors fade. Reverting to the rank of major general and commanding one of the United States’ corps areas would have been a huge letdown—besides, he had already done that. The Philippines provided him a comfortable stage far removed from his home turf where he could assume the role of the region’s number one soldier and benefit from his long association with Quezon.

They had become an interesting pair. Francis Bowes Sayre, Woodrow Wilson’s son-in-law and later high commissioner of the Philippines, remembered Quezon as “one of the most colorful figures in the Far East.” Sayre described Quezon as “impulsive, daring, charming beyond words to all whom he set out to win; he was adroit, keen-witted, ambitious and always dramatic. He had outwitted and out-maneuvered all his rivals and stood clearly at the forefront, the unquestioned political boss of the Philippines.”1

Sayre recalled MacArthur as “sharp and observant [but] always indrawn and playing his part as an actor.” To average Americans in Manila, MacArthur was “inscrutable and enigmatic” because they only saw him from a distance, “for he held himself aloof from the crowd.” MacArthur’s personality, Sayre claimed, lacked “the open, democratic, American approach.”²

The first step in a MacArthur-Quezon partnership was for Quezon to ask the United States to provide a military mission to his new commonwealth government, much as it had been doing for a number of Latin American countries. The relationship was fuzzy, because on the one hand American troops still in the Philippines were directly responsible to the War Department, but on the other hand, Quezon needed to develop an independent defense force responsible to the commonwealth.

When Congress approved the military-mission legislation, it was common knowledge that Quezon wanted MacArthur to head it and that the general would quite willingly do so. In fact, MacArthur appears to have crafted the legislation for secretary of war Dern and drafted—at Quezon’s request—Quezon’s subsequent letter requesting MacArthur’s services.³

As part of the establishment of the military mission, the legislation provided that MacArthur would be able to continue to draw his salary as a major general while at the same time receiving compensation from the Philippine government. It was a very generous double-dip that provided MacArthur with $7,500 annually from the United States Army and a handsome package from Quezon of $18,000 per year in salary, an additional $15,000 annual personal allowance, and the use of a seven-room, fully air-conditioned suite atop the Manila Hotel, all worth around $650,000 today.4

MacArthur’s first preference through all this would have been to be named high commissioner of the Philippines, the top American position in the islands after the post of governor-general was abolished under the country’s commonwealth status. Despite his assurances to Quezon that “the great work involved as your Military Adviser seems to me to transcend in ultimate importance anything else that is conceivable,” MacArthur waged an active campaign for the commissionership with Franklin Roosevelt and a less-than-subtle campaign against Frank Murphy, a former governor-general then filling the high commissioner seat.⁵

According to MacArthur, Roosevelt agreed to name him to the high commissioner post at a private dinner between the two at Hyde Park, New York, on September 3, 1935. Then when MacArthur discovered that he would have to resign from the army in order to hold this civilian position, he suggested special legislation to fix the matter. Clearly he did not intend to resign from the army, and he concluded that should Roosevelt decide “to abandon either now or in the future your purpose in making the appointment… I will conform instantly to the revised plan.”⁶

But did Roosevelt have a devious political motive for packing MacArthur off to the Philippines in one role or another? MacArthur certainly had his share of political enemies as well as the baggage of a divorce and his liaison with Isabel, but some Republicans were enamored with him as presidential material—particularly as no front-runner had yet emerged against Roosevelt in 1936. Rather than have MacArthur, an ambitious former chief of staff with time on his hands, flitting around Washington or New York, Roosevelt may have wanted him out of the country.

When Frank Murphy finally stepped down as high commissioner the following year, Major General Hugh Drum, then commander of the army’s Hawaiian Department, suggested to MacArthur that he “could really do both” jobs—high commissioner and military adviser—adding: “The combination would have many advantages.” Drum reminded MacArthur, “I have not changed my views as given to you in Washington one afternoon relative to 1940. Such a possibility is in the offing through the background you have created.”7 However veiled the message, this suggests that Drum and MacArthur had had some level of conversation about the possibility of MacArthur’s presidential candidacy in 1940.

In response to MacArthur’s request, Roosevelt said he was “inclined to hope that there will be little or no trouble on the Hill” in resolving the prohibition against MacArthur’s holding both a civilian post and a military rank. But in the meantime, secretary of war Dern issued orders commanding MacArthur to “act as the Military Adviser of the Commonwealth Government in the establishment and development of a system of National Defense.”⁸

As MacArthur understood the plan, he would arrive in Manila wearing the four stars of a full general and holding the title of chief of staff. His stature as America’s top soldier would make for a triumphant return to the country his father had once governed, provide prestige for Quezon as the newly elected president of the commonwealth, and underscore America’s commitment to the defense of the archipelago. On December 15, 1935—thirty days or so after his arrival—his term as chief of staff would come to an end and Roosevelt would announce his successor. To the surprise of MacArthur, as well as Secretary Dern, it didn’t happen that way.

Roosevelt, never one to shy away from reminding all comers that he alone was the keeper of the powers of the presidency, made a different decision midcourse. On October 2, as MacArthur and Major Dwight Eisenhower, who was to accompany him to the Philippines as his chief of staff, were speeding west through Wyoming on a Union Pacific train bound for San Francisco, where they would then board a ship bound for Manila, the general received a telegram from the assistant secretary of war, who was acting in Dern’s absence. It announced that Roosevelt had appointed Malin Craig chief of staff effective immediately and that MacArthur would revert to the rank of major general.

MacArthur’s reaction was loud enough to be heard across Wyoming. “It was,” Eisenhower recalled of MacArthur’s tirade, “an explosive denunciation of politics, bad manners, bad judgment, broken promises, arrogance, unconstitutionality, insensitivity, and the way the world had gone to hell.”9 Then, his rant finished, MacArthur, in characteristic fashion, dictated politically correct telegrams: to Roosevelt, praising the president’s appointment of Craig as “splendid”; to the assistant secretary of war, asking him to convey further to Roosevelt that Craig’s appointment was “not only admirable but timely”; and to Craig himself, expressing “keen anticipation to what cannot fail to be a successful tenure of office.” But then, in what was also characteristic MacArthur fashion, the general sent one more telegram. It went to the press-relations section of the War Department, asking that his magnanimous telegrams be given “immediate publicity.”¹⁰

Wearing the two stars of a major general, Douglas MacArthur embarked from San Francisco for Manila on the liner President Hoover. The most important member of his contingent was his mother. Mary Pinkney Hardy MacArthur was then eighty-three and finally failing for real. Her son arranged to have the family’s longtime physician, Major Howard J. Hutter, assigned to his staff, but by the time they arrived in Manila, Pinky’s situation was grim. Five weeks later, she succumbed to a cerebral thrombosis, and, as MacArthur sadly recalled, their “devoted comradeship of so many years came to an end.”¹¹

But just as the most dominant woman in his life was departing, another, who would come to take Pinky’s place in importance and influence, made her appearance. Like Pinky, Jean Marie Faircloth was a southern girl, born in Nashville, Tennessee, on December 28, 1898. A spinster of thirty-six when she met MacArthur, Miss Faircloth was hardly spinsterish in personality. Lively, engaging, and usually beaming with a smile, Jean was a petite, brown-eyed brunette who exuded confidence. She was also something of a fashion hound. But where Louise had focused on getting, Jean’s priority was giving.

Her father, Edward C. Faircloth, was a wealthy banker and businessman. When Jean was eight, her parents divorced, and her mother, Sallie Beard, took Jean and her two brothers back to her birthplace, Murfreesboro. Like Pinky’s Hardy clan, the Beards were a family of Confederate veterans. Jean was a member of both the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and her fellow members recalled that “every time Jean Faircloth heard a Fourth of July firecracker go off, she jumped to attention and saluted.” Young men who came courting were advised, “If you want to win Jean Marie, you better get a uniform.”12

Jean attended Ward-Belmont College in Nashville for a year and eventually graduated from Soule College in Murfreesboro. She was not close to her father when she was growing up, but as both grew older, Edward Faircloth took his only daughter on trips and cruises throughout the world. After he died, she was left with a substantial inheritance that she determined to use continuing those travels. It was just such a trip that found her a passenger on the President Hoover bound for the Far East in the fall of 1935.

MacArthur was attentive to his ailing mother on that voyage, but after being introduced to Jean, he ordered flowers delivered to her cabin when the ship called in Honolulu. They were a pair from the beginning, although without the public attention and rush to the altar that had characterized his courtship of Louise. Jean chose to stay in Manila when the President Hoover docked, and they began a ritual of evening movies and dinners overlooking Manila Bay.

When both returned to the United States in 1937 for a visit, MacArthur went about army business and arranged for Pinky’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery next to his father, while Jean quietly visited family in Murfreesboro and Louisville. Hearing about what had become her plans to marry the general, Jean’s aunt remarked, “The people of America will certainly be surprised.” Jean flashed one of her trademark smiles and replied, “Well, the people in Manila won’t!”¹³

They married in the Municipal Building in New York City on the morning of April 30, 1937. The only witnesses were two of MacArthur’s aides. Shortly afterward, MacArthur took Jean on her first visit to West Point, showing her the place to which he was so firmly attached.

Back in Manila several months later, they settled into MacArthur’s penthouse suite atop the new five-story wing of the Manila Hotel, which afforded panoramic views of Manila harbor and the vibrant sunsets that silhouetted the island of Corregidor to the west. Their only child, Arthur MacArthur IV, would be born early the following year, on February 21, 1938. It was all very peaceful, genteel, and romantic. But there were alarming indicators afoot that this tranquillity was about to be shattered for the MacArthur family and for all of the Philippines.14

The United States had assumed that Japan would be its foe in the Pacific since Theodore—not Franklin—Roosevelt had warned of sooner or later having to fight that empire. But despite the significant amount of resources and attention—as well as a certain degree of angst—that had been invested in the Philippine archipelago over the course of four decades, there had never been an unequivocal strategy about how the islands were to be defended. Some maintained they neither would be nor could be. “I doubt very much,” former governor-general W. Cameron Forbes told army chief of staff Summerall in 1927, “if any real effort will be made to defend the Philippine Islands as such. They are indefensible and from a military point of view not worth defending. The main thing is to make any interference with them as costly as possible.”¹⁵

Any American defense of the Philippines was rooted in Plan Orange, a blueprint for war with Japan that was one of a series of color-coded military plans devised to protect the United States against likely and—in the case of Plan Red against Great Britain—unlikely opponents. The Joint Planning Committee of the Joint Army and Navy Board, which was essentially a limited forerunner of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been routinely developing and revising such plans since around 1904. They formed the basis of countless war games at both the army and navy war colleges and informed—as well as biased—a generation of officers.

Initially, Plan Orange envisioned an American fleet sailing from the West Coast to the Philippines and defeating the main Japanese fleet either en route or shortly after marshaling in Manila Bay, which the army was charged with holding. This smacked of the old saw about preparing to fight the last war, à la Admiral George Dewey sailing to Manila Bay to defeat the Spanish in 1898, although he did so from Hong Kong, not California. Such a West-Coast-to-Far-East naval rescue was made more problematic after World War I by Japan’s wartime acquisition—as a nominal member of the Allied powers—of German territories in the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands. They straddled the direct Hawaii-to-Manila route and provided Japan with naval bases as well as opportunities to deploy land-based airpower.

In its 1924 version of Plan Orange, the Joint Planning Committee advocated offensive sea and air operations against Japan’s naval forces, to be followed by the rapid deployment of at least fifty thousand troops from the West Coast of the United States to Oahu within ten days. They were to be prepared to depart Hawaii for Manila Bay four days later. Given daunting logistics and the fact that this was roughly one-third of the strength of the entire American army, it was totally unrealistic.

The 1924 version was, however, prescient in one key recommendation: planners were insistent that both army and navy forces operate under one unified command. The generals and admirals of the Joint Army and Navy Board balked and agreed only to mutual cooperation between the services, while maintaining separate army and navy commands. A few years later, though, this was revised to provide an initial period after the commencement of hostilities for unified command under the navy, which was acknowledged to have the “paramount interest” given the watery expanses of the Pacific. Complete and continuing unity of command would become a critical concept in the years ahead.16

By the 1930s, Plan Orange had evolved with the realization that only a slower deployment of troops was practical. Rather than rushing to the Philippines, troops were charged with first ejecting Japanese forces from the Marshall and Caroline Islands to protect their advancing lines of communication and supply. In 1936, the Joint Board reduced the mission of American troops in the Philippines from defending Manila and its environs to holding only the entrance to Manila Bay in expectation of the navy’s arrival.

Finally, by 1937, with Japan aggressively renewing its attacks in China, the Joint Board came to the realization that US forces could not hold the Philippines against a serious Japanese attempt long enough for the United States Fleet to arrive. Since increasing defenses in the islands was out of the question given public sentiment and other priorities closer to home, the board called for withdrawing to a defensive Alaska-Oahu-Panama line in the eastern Pacific and employing economic pressure to force Japan’s collapse while a sufficiently large army was mobilized.17

As the man on the scene, Douglas MacArthur had never put much faith in the quick-relief component of Plan Orange, although, as we shall see, by 1942 that is exactly what he expected. Instead, during the 1930s, he promoted a largely volunteer army of citizen soldiers built around a cadre of regular officers and NCOs. Upon MacArthur’s arrival in 1935, the Philippine National Assembly appropriated $8 million for these purposes with the expectation of expending similar amounts annually during the decade leading to full independence, at which time the country’s military would be fully developed.

It didn’t work out that way. MacArthur’s grand plans aside, this amount of funding was a pittance compared to the needs of maintaining an eleven-thousand-man force of regular troops, providing five and a half months of training annually for forty thousand citizen soldiers, building a fleet of fifty torpedo boats, and purchasing an air force of 250 planes, not to mention creating a Philippine military academy, lesser service schools, and more than 120 training camps.¹⁸

Even after it took more than a year to get the first contingent of twenty thousand trainees into camps—they would not report until early 1937—and after trainees showed little retention of military skills when called out on subsequent maneuvers, MacArthur clung to the citizen-army concept. “The result,” MacArthur told Quezon in his first official report, “is that in the world today there is no other defensive system that provides an equal security at remotely comparable cost to the people maintaining it.” But that was precisely the problem: you get what you pay for. “Though we worked doggedly through 1936 and 1937,” recalled Dwight Eisenhower, “ours was a hopeless venture. The Philippine government simply could not afford to build real security from attack.”¹⁹

While the American War Department “loaned” the Philippine defense forces largely obsolete stocks of munitions, substantial reinforcements and armaments for American troops remaining in the army’s Philippine Department (not under MacArthur’s command) were not forthcoming. Universal shortages aside, by 1938 a large part of the rationale for this meagerness was that under Plan Orange as it was then conceived, a prolonged, self-sustained defense of the Philippines was no longer considered viable.

Brigadier General Walter Krueger, chief of the army’s War Plans Division, warned chief of staff Malin Craig in February of 1938 that it was “highly improbable, as matters now stand, that expeditionary forces will be sent to the Philippines in the early stages of an Orange war. Even if the dispatch of such forces were contemplated, it would be impossible to predict, with any degree of accuracy, the time when they would arrive.” Krueger advised Craig to tell the Philippine Department’s commander to “accomplish his mission for the maximum time possible with the personnel and reserves then available to him.”20

Other than wrangling a few officers from the army’s Philippine Department to serve on his military adviser staff, MacArthur stayed focused on the Sisyphean task of building a viable Philippine military. Few doubted, as he had assured Quezon before taking the post, that MacArthur was “prepared to devote the remainder of my life if necessary to securing a proper defense for the Philippine Nation.” But his promise to forge Quezon “a weapon which will spell the safety of your nation from brutal aggression until the end of time” was clearly standard MacArthur hyperbole.²¹

And, as usual, MacArthur’s continuing rhetoric and military programs did not play well with the liberal press and isolationist and pacifist policy makers, with which Washington in the 1930s was rife. Many people in the United States were still critical of MacArthur over his role in the Bonus March and convinced that he was needlessly militarizing the Philippines and antagonizing Japan in the process. Reports drifted back to Manila that there was a growing movement to recall him as military adviser.

In early August of 1937, chief of staff Craig cabled MacArthur the antithesis of the message MacArthur had once received from Pershing detailing him to foreign service. This time, it was said that MacArthur had been away too long, and after two years overseas, he was to be brought home for duty in the United States. MacArthur responded graciously and professed to look forward “to whatever duty the War Department may have decided I should now undertake in the service of my country.”22 But for the next few weeks, his pacing on the terrace of his Manila penthouse became more intense. He was definitely in a quandary. What should he do?

He finally cabled Craig on September 16, 1937: he would retire from the army. Citing poor health—which certainly wasn’t true—and other fabricated reasons, from his work as military adviser being completed to his wish to open up the promotion ladder to younger men, MacArthur chose December 31, 1937, as his final day in the uniform he had worn so proudly since arriving on the plain at West Point thirty-eight years earlier.

In truth, of course, the primary reason for his retirement was that after being chief of staff and enjoying the subsequent grandeur of his position in the Philippines—however hollow his command—he simply could not bear to serve under anyone and retire as a mere corps commander or occupy a similar subordinate post. He found that thought, as he candidly told Craig, “repugnant.”²³ From his perspective, MacArthur would go out on top on his own terms.

Besides, he still had the Philippines and his exalted rank as field marshal of the Philippine army. While never in use in the American military, the rank of field marshal among international forces was generally thought to outrank that of four-star generals and admirals. Conferring the rank on MacArthur in 1936 as part of the Philippines’ National Defense Act appeared to be Quezon’s idea, but much later Quezon acknowledged to Eisenhower that the suggestion had been MacArthur’s. At the time, Eisenhower tried to talk MacArthur out of accepting the rank, later saying he had thought it “pompous and rather ridiculous to be the field marshal of a virtually non-existing army.”²⁴ MacArthur demurred, took up his field marshal’s baton, and that was that.

But not quite. The War Department made it clear in 1936 that no matter what rank the Philippine government chose to bestow on MacArthur or any other American officer serving in the capacity of military adviser, the American military would consider Philippine forces analogous to a national guard until the commonwealth achieved full independence. As such, it would not render any honors or salutes and certainly no command deference simply because of a rank conferred by the Philippine government.25

Further, after MacArthur’s retirement—Philippine field marshal though he might still be—the War Department went to great lengths to explain that the retired general would no longer represent the United States as a military adviser to the Philippines. He was not to exercise command of any American forces, and any requests from the Philippine government for personnel, materiel, or services were to be transmitted through the army’s Philippine Department, not MacArthur.²⁶

By January of 1938, fully retired and perhaps feeling a little out of the mainstream, MacArthur came up with one of his patented ideas, calculated to be showy and grandiose, with plenty of the pageantry he craved. He ordered Eisenhower and Lieutenant Colonel James Ord, who had remained as his aides in the military adviser’s office, to plan large-scale maneuvers near Manila. They were to culminate with a massive parade that MacArthur thought would showcase the country’s developing military, building pride and support in the process. Given the limited budget of the Philippine forces, Eisenhower and Ord were appalled at the cost of bringing thousands of troops from throughout the islands to the capital, but they began to make the plans.

When President Quezon got wind of the proposed troop movements and asked Eisenhower about it, Eisenhower was astonished to learn that MacArthur had not cleared the event with Quezon. The Philippine president got upset with MacArthur and angrily called a halt to the maneuvers. MacArthur then called Eisenhower and Ord on the carpet and denied he had ever given orders for them to proceed—he merely wanted them to investigate the possibility, he said. This was “certainly news to us,” Eisenhower recalled, and from then on “never again” were he and MacArthur “on the same warm and cordial terms.”²⁷

The parade episode also struck a sour note into the mutual admiration society that had theretofore been established between MacArthur and Quezon. Part of the problem was that Quezon was flexing his political muscle. He had begun to call for full independence earlier than 1946, but at the same time, he questioned the effectiveness of MacArthur’s plans for a citizen army. In the fall of 1939, Quezon told a large gathering in Manila on the anniversary of the founding of the commonwealth, “The Philippines could not be defended even if every last Filipino were armed with modern weapons.” He shut out MacArthur, going so far as to have his secretary, Jorge Vargas, tell MacArthur that Quezon was too busy to see him. Uncharacteristically, MacArthur seems to have taken this in stride and calmly told Vargas, “Jorge, some day your boss is going to want to see me more than I want to see him.”28

At the same time, MacArthur was also losing Eisenhower. After seven years with MacArthur, four of them in the Philippines, Eisenhower finally prevailed upon the general to approve his transfer back to the States, where he was anxious to get a troop command in light of the gathering war clouds over Europe. When the two parted in Manila, in December of 1939, each had occasionally rankled the other during their association, but MacArthur had generally held Eisenhower in high esteem, and, later frustrations aside, Eisenhower would reflect that he was always “deeply grateful for the administrative experience he gained under General MacArthur.”²⁹ When they next met, it was in Japan in 1946, and both were five-star generals.

Eisenhower’s replacement as MacArthur’s chief of staff and right-hand man was Lieutenant Colonel Richard K. Sutherland, who had joined the staff after Ord’s death in a plane crash the previous year. A Yale graduate who had gotten his commission by competitive exam, Sutherland was brash, hard-edged, and frequently unpleasant with his subordinates. He was, however, devotedly loyal to MacArthur, and the general considered him invaluable in return.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard J. Marshall became MacArthur’s other key aide, charged with the thankless tasks of procurement and supply. He was a graduate of Virginia Military Institute and had been a battery commander in the artillery before transferring to the Quartermaster Corps. While neither Sutherland nor Marshall could claim the West Point pedigree that MacArthur held so dear, they became the first members of the group of insiders that would come to be called MacArthur’s Bataan Gang.³⁰

There was another Marshall—also a graduate of VMI—who would come to figure heavily in MacArthur’s future. This was George Catlett Marshall, who had briefly been part of Pershing’s headquarters staff at Chaumont. His path and MacArthur’s had first crossed at Fort Leavenworth prior to that war, and whatever else George Marshall thought of Douglas MacArthur, he had supported MacArthur’s attempt to press on to capture Metz even as some on Pershing’s staff questioned MacArthur’s frontline antics. Marshall’s specialty was in administration and training, but when he was promoted to colonel in September of 1933, he hoped for command of an infantry regiment. Instead he was assigned to be a senior instructor for the Illinois National Guard.

Years later, those looking to magnify every slight tension in the MacArthur-Marshall relationship would be quick to say that MacArthur, as chief of staff, had exiled Marshall to the Illinois National Guard. But MacArthur’s oft-quoted opinion that Marshall had “no superior among infantry colonels” was sincere, and MacArthur wanted to provide top training to a politically sensitive command. Pershing, and by some accounts Marshall himself, appealed to MacArthur, but he refused to assign Marshall otherwise or promote him to brigadier general. MacArthur may have been saving Marshall for a temporary major generalship as chief of infantry when that position opened up, but before that happened MacArthur was out as chief of staff.31

Finally, the floodgates opened for George Marshall, and he was promoted to brigadier general in October of 1936. After a stint commanding an infantry brigade at Vancouver Barracks in Washington State, he moved to Washington, DC, first briefly as chief of the War Plans Division and then as deputy chief of staff. He got on well with Franklin Roosevelt during their early encounters and seems to have impressed the president by speaking his mind. The result was that on September 1, 1939, George Marshall became chief of staff and a four-star general. On that same day, Adolf Hitler invaded Poland.

For a man whose strengths usually included the ability to see the sweep of geography and its relationship to any battlefield, Douglas MacArthur gave little advice on the early phases of the new war in Europe. To be sure, the United States was not yet in the conflict, but a key reason for MacArthur’s reticence was his preoccupation with the situation in the Philippines. Prior whimsical whispers of his possible candidacy for the presidency in 1940 proved just that—whimsy. Besides, Roosevelt shocked observers and defied convention by announcing his run for an unprecedented third term. Consequently MacArthur once again focused on obtaining appointment as high commissioner.

In March of 1941, MacArthur wrote presidential press secretary Stephen Early asking for the position in anticipation of Francis Bowes Sayre being recalled to the State Department. Telling Early that he held “the complete confidence of the Filipinos,” MacArthur went on to assert, “From Vladivostok to Singapore I am thoroughly familiar with the most intimate details, political, military and commercial. I have a personal acquaintance with everyone of importance in the Orient and I believe no American holds the friendship and respect of this part of the world more than myself.” As was his custom—and despite their prior fencing—MacArthur closed with a glowing tribute, calling FDR “not only our greatest statesman but what to me is even more thrilling, our greatest military strategist.”32

Franklin Roosevelt, himself a master of effusive praise, was the least likely person to be swayed by it. Determined to keep MacArthur on the military side, Roosevelt had his military aide, Edwin “Pa” Watson, assure MacArthur that “in all discussions as to the availability of various active and retired officers, your name is always outstanding and most seriously considered.”³³ Just what role he might fill was clarified two months later, when chief of staff Marshall informed MacArthur unofficially that he would be “the logical selection as the Army Commander in the Far East should the situation approach a crisis.”³⁴ Two days after Marshall wrote this, it did.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler sent three million troops on a massive invasion of the Soviet Union, his former ally. His turnabout momentarily gave leaders in Japan pause. Because American code breakers were already deciphering some Japanese intercepts, Roosevelt was able to gauge the debate within the Japanese government. He characterized it as “a real drag-down and knock-out fight among themselves… to decide which way they are going to jump—attack Russia, attack the South Seas (thus throwing in their lot definitely with Germany) or whether they will sit on the fence and be more friendly with us.”³⁵

Japan chose to continue its attacks in China and pursue its long-range goal—to secure natural resources in the East Indies and on the Malay Peninsula. All maps showed the Philippines to be between Japan and that goal. In mid-July of 1941, with Vichy France essentially a puppet state of Germany, Japanese forces completed the occupation of French Indochina (present-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), partially encircling the Philippines and coming within striking distance of Singapore and Borneo. Roosevelt’s reaction on July 26 was to freeze Japanese assets in the United States, close the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping, and, along with the British and Dutch, create an economic blockade of Japan.

Once again Japan faced a critical decision. It could consolidate its gains to date and negotiate with the United States and its allies for oil and other resources in amounts that would sustain it but not allow the pursuit of further conquest, or it could continue its expansion. Largely as a matter of saving face, militarists in its government prevailed and chose the latter.

On July 26, as part of the American reaction, the president nationalized the Philippine army into the service of the United States, and the War Department established a new Far Eastern command. Acting on his unofficial statement to MacArthur of the month before, Marshall recalled him to active duty as a major general and designated him “Commanding General, United States Army Forces, Far East” (USAFFE).36 A day later, Roosevelt appointed him to the temporary rank of lieutenant general.

Suddenly, Manuel Quezon was only too happy to see him—just as MacArthur had predicted. Quezon wrote MacArthur the next day expressing his full confidence that MacArthur would “attain in this difficult assignment the same success that has crowned your every endeavor in the past.”³⁷ No doubt thinking of the MacArthur allure that the general himself went out of his way to promote, Quezon felt assured that if Roosevelt was appointing MacArthur to this position, it was evidence of a major American commitment to the defense of the Philippines and, if necessary, interdiction against Japanese aggression throughout the Far East.

It was a sign of his long-standing personal affection for Quezon that MacArthur appears to have welcomed him back into the fold. But MacArthur could afford to be magnanimous. He suddenly had much of what he wanted: Roosevelt had given him supreme US Army authority in the Far East; Quezon again looked to him as the savior of the Philippines; and the Philippine Department of the US Army, which had occasionally bedeviled him with its chain of command running to Washington, was firmly under his control.

Paying more attention to these largely cosmetic changes around him than to the strength and intentions of Japan’s military, MacArthur was his optimistic self. Writing John C. O’Laughlin, a staunch Republican and the publisher of the Army and Navy Journal, about the mood in the Far East, MacArthur asserted: “President Roosevelt’s action… completely changed the picture and an immediate and universal feeling of confidence and assurance resulted.” Tokyo, MacArthur claimed, “was dumbfounded and depressed.”38

Even as he wrote these lines, MacArthur received word that the planning gurus in the War Department had once again been tinkering with Plan Orange. In fact, in recognition of the likelihood that any future conflict would be against multiple foes, the color-coded, single-foe plans originally devised decades earlier had been replaced with a rainbow scheme. Part of this scheme was a plan called Rainbow 5, which contemplated a two-ocean global war in alliance with Great Britain against both Germany and Japan.

Rainbow 5 had grown out of joint British-American talks—dubbed ABC for “American-British conversations”—which in many respects were the forerunner of the deliberations of the wartime Combined Chiefs of Staff. Of central importance to the Philippines were the salient points that any war in Europe would take precedence over Pacific operations—a strategy quickly termed Germany First—and that the key line of defense in the Pacific would be the previously delineated Alaska-Hawaii-Panama axis. Any operations in the Philippines were to be conducted with existing forces and then only with the aim of holding Manila Bay and its immediate environs.³⁹

While he had disregarded much of Plan Orange and its subsequent revisions, MacArthur reacted angrily to Rainbow 5. What had he been working for these last six years if the Philippines were to be presumptively abandoned? Forcefully, he lobbied Marshall and insisted that the Philippines should and could be held, and in late November of 1941, the Joint Army and Navy Board amended Rainbow 5 to approve MacArthur’s recommendation that the Philippine Sea Frontier be expanded from Luzon to include such land and sea areas necessary to defend the entire Philippine archipelago.

Under the amended Rainbow 5, in the event of hostilities MacArthur was further assigned the tasks of supporting the US Navy in raiding Japanese sea communications, conducting air raids against Japanese forces and installations within range of his available bases, including Formosa, and cooperating with British and Dutch allies in defense of their territories. With British agreement, the joint ABC-1 plan added Luzon to Malaya, Singapore, and Java as key points to be held against any Japanese attack.40 The list would prove prescient.

But by committing to defend the entire Philippine archipelago, MacArthur created a logistical nightmare as well as an operational “mission impossible” that would soon come back to haunt him. The only thing that would spawn more dire consequences was his unbridled enthusiasm and misplaced confidence. MacArthur’s biggest liability was his own unrealistic assessment of the situation. Repeatedly, during the fall of 1941, he advised Marshall and the War Department of his preparations and the effectiveness of his command.

In response, Marshall continued to express satisfaction if not some measure of surprise, given the limited resources available for American defense that Marshall faced daily. “The Secretary of War and I were highly pleased,” Marshall cabled MacArthur on November 28, 1941, “to receive your report that your command is ready for any eventuality.”⁴¹

After more than a decade of Washington’s lack of interest in the Philippines and its ability to defend itself, MacArthur’s exuberance about the capabilities of his staff and the untried Filipino soldiers they led infected the War Department with similar optimism. If MacArthur, in his most pontifical way, said it was so, it must be so, and given the enormous demands cascading on them from around the globe, the Washington establishment momentarily believed him.