MacARTHUR-THE MAN AND HIS CAREER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 145, 2 April 1942, Page 6

MacARTHUR-THE MAN AND HIS CAREER

They Cali Him "The Buck Private’s Gary Cooper" But His Reputation Is Founded On Solid Worth WHAT kind of man is General Douglas MacArthur? Here is a pen portrait done for "Life" by Clare Boothe, a friend and fellow-American-or as much of the portrait as our smaller pages will hold. It was written just before Japan attacked the Philippines.

N days of "international amity," democratic peoples tend to accord professional soldiers the same degree of social respect extended to local fire chiefs. The Péople’s Army runs down, and the people run down their Army. But when the winds of war begin to blow, the People look about them to see who and where their fighting men are. They ask of one another urgently, "Say, have we got any good generals?" General Douglas MacArthur’s record might be summarised by the remark of an A.E.F. private in 1918: "He’s a hell-to-break-fast baby, long dnd lean, who can spit nickels and chase Germans as well as any doughboy in the Rainbow." West Point and France MacArthur graduated as second-lieu-tenant of engineers at the head of the West Point class of 1903, in which stiff competition had been provided by Ulysses Grant III, grandson of the Civil War general. He piled up the highest scholastic record made at the Point in 25 years and, as a plebe, in spite of the race with Grant for top honours, found time to break another West Point record by getting "engaged" to eight girls at once, seven having been the previous cadet record. MacArthur denies this story, saying he was at no time aware of having been so "heavily engaged by the enemy." After @ spectacular performance as commander of the Rainbow Division in France in 1919, he was appointed Superintendent of West Point, the youngest man ever to hold that position. In 1925 he became the youngest active major-general in the Army, and when, in 1930, Hoover made him Chief of Staff, he was still a military prodigy: youngest Chief of Staff the country had ever had, the only one to be reappointed for an additional year, and thus the one who held that top-flight Army job longest. Coincidentally, at the age of 50, he was the youngest living U.S, four-star general, a rank theretofore held only by Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Pershing, Bliss, March, and Summerall. War From the Cradle Like George Washington, who wrote to his mother, "I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me there is something charming in the sound." MacArthur is a lover of the art of war. This perhaps was childhood conditioning. He says his earliest recollection is the sound of army bugles. He was born on January 26, 1880, on his father’s post at Little Rock Barracks, Arkansas, and he claims to remember his mother and a company sergeant protecting him at the age of four from Indians with bows

and arrows raiding his father’s army barracks in New Mexico. As a young boy, MacArthur gobbled up with his breakfast porridge much melodramatic lore of the Civil War, as well as many a sound professional lecture on Civil War tactics and strategy. His father, General Arthur MacArthur, was a Wisconsinite of Scots ancestry, who in 1861 had joined the 24th Wisconsin Infantry in the Army of the Union as

a lieutenant, emerged with four wounds as a colonel ("The Boy Colonel of the West") and, by that time himself in love with the art of war, decided to remain in the Army. MacArthur snr. saw action in the Philippines during 1898-1901: in 1900 he was made commander of the Philippines Division. Long before Douglas MacArthur ever dreamed of being a general, much less a field-marshal, Father MacArthur was minding his P’s and Q’s — Philippines and» Quezon-in the Pacific. It. was to General Arthur MacArthur that a young Filipino insurgent major surrendered his sword in 1901. Thirty-five years later this same Filipino, Manuel Quezon, now first President of the Philippines, gave "the General’s son the gold baton of a Philippine fieldmarshal, A Perfect Exit The circumstances of LieutenantGeneral Arthur MacArthur’s death in 1912 outdo in drama anything that even his son has achieved. Against doctor’s orders he had insisted on attending in Milwaukee the 50th Annual Reunion of his regiment: of the Grand Army of the Republic. There, in the banquet ‘hall, he was called upon to

make a speech, and mounted the platform to deliver what hebegan prophetically by saying was to be his last tribute to his old comrades in arms. As he -reached his fiery peroration, his voice suddenly faltered, he swayed — and he drop-

ped dead. There was a shocked silence in the hall. Then his old adjutant, who stood beside him, took the tattered and blood-stained flag of the regiment, cast it over the dead General, and piling drama on drama, himself fell lifeless over his beloved chief’s body. In the years between his own first service in the Philippines in 1903, and the days of America’s entrance into the World War, the rise of Douglas MacArthur up the military ladder was steady if mot spectacular. In 1914, Douglas MacArthur was with General Funston in Vera Cruz. Disguised as a Mexican "bum," he reconnoitred voluntarily behind the Mexican lines to locate three available locomotives for his General. He located them. But what he remembers with most pleasure about this incident was that his "liaison" behind the enemy lines was a_ helpful young German Legation official named Franz von Papen. "Beau Brummel of the Army" MacArthur has been called "The D’Artagnan of the A.E.F.," "The Beau Brummel of the Army," "The Disraeli of Chiefs of Staff," "The Buck Private’s Gary Cooper." One World War reporter in a flight of patriotic fancy wrote,

"You could tell he was a soldier, even in a fur coat or a bathing suit." Yet MacArthur, dressed in a bathing suit and standing by the blue-tiled swimming pool of the Manila Hotel, might not look obstreperously "military." White-skinned and lean, his shoulders are narrow and sloping. His nervous hands are small. His hair, once black and thick, is now black and thin, and combed from left ear to right, across the top of a narrow forehead. His face is intellectual, aesthetic, rather than martial. But whether MacArthur in bathing trunks looks like a movie fan’s idea of a warrior is not important. In sharkskin or shorts, khaki or cutaway, MacArthur has a soldier's courage. It has been written into the record in the form of two World War wound stripes, 13 decorations for gallantry under fire, and seven citations. While the doughboys were singing in the bloody trenches, "The General got the Croix de Guerre, parley-voo, The General got the Croix de Guerre, The so-and-so was never there, Hinky-dinky-parley-voo," the men of the 42nd Division knew that their General MacArthur was very much there. Wearing an overseas cap instead of the safer (and regulation) steel helmet, "the Fiery Arkansan" was reckless to the point of accompanying his troops on raids into enemy trenches. On one such occasion, he escorted an unwilling German officer back across No Man’s Land with the aid of nothing more than a riding-crop. His immediate commander, General Menoher, wrote to General Pershing: "The contributions made to our military establishment by this General Officer have already had far-reaching effects. He has stood for the actual physical command of large bodies of (Continued on next page)

GENERAL MacARTHUR (Continued from previous page) troops.in battle-not for a day, but for days’ duration, and I believe he has actually commanded larger bodies of troops on the battle line than any other officer in our Army, with, in each instance, conspicuous success." His Gift of Words MacArthur's gift of words, his flair for dramatising incidents, as well as his sound military understanding, stood the young officer in good stead as press relations officer on the General Staff in 1915. After World War L., his instinctive preference for ten-dollar words delivered in a million-dollar manner developed rapidly into a penchant for oratory and he speedily became the most effective and spectacular speaker and writer the Army had. Rumour in the Philippines has it that his reports from 1936-41 to the War Department made such good reading by contrast with duller reports that in simple gratitude for a few literate hours he got command of the USAFFE (United States Army Forces in the Far East). His knowledge of military history is profound and his memory of that prodigious sort that gives a man’s subordinates the creeps, so accurately can he quote, days later, a report, a record, a book, a conversation. In conversation the General is positively pyrotechnic. Changing at will from a_ mellifluous melodramatic whisper to a fiery snort, from brutal fact to flight of sheer rodomontade, he uses phrases like "We must foil the enemy," "We stand on the eve of a great battle," "We must not spill our precious blood on foreign soil in vain,

os in vain!" Intelligent listeners, however, rarely fail to perceive that beneath this baroque facade of rhetoric, MacArthur’s ideas generally make shattering sense. His eloquence-and his wis-dom-reached a peak during the years from 1930 to 1935 when he was Chief of Staff. Winston Churchill’s compilation of his own unheeded warnings to the Empire, While England Slept, could be, if not matched in literary style, surely surpassed in military value by a compilation of MacArthur’s warnings to the Senate, the Congress, the public, while America was not only sleeping, but snoring. Some Opponents MacArthur has always been too colourful and controversial a figure not to have acquired some enemies. He has been accused of being a swaggerer, a swashbuckler, and a back-slapper; dictatorial, self-opinionated, austere, obstinate, and aggressive. He has been criticised for his long matinee-idol cigarette holders (which in later years he has abandoned for Corona Coronas), for his sartorial effects when in mufti and the plumcoloured ties he wears when in khaki (he promoted the introduction of the open-jacket and soft collar into the Army), for the consciously rakish tilt at which he wears his heavily-brassed hat. The late Floyd Gibbons wrote that it was "just the tilt which permitted his personality to emerge, without violating Army regulations." Even in the muck and grime of the French front, MacArthur always managed to look as though he were on dress parade, often wearing Errol Flynnish black turtleneck sweaters which did not show trench mud,