Biography of MacArthur a rewarding read

The Most Dangerous Man
in America

The Making of Douglas MacArthur

By Mark Perry

Basic Books. 384 pp. $29.99

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Paul Jablow

In September 1943, at the height of the New Guinea campaign in World War II, Gen. Douglas MacArthur decided to board the lead B-17 plane to witness an airdrop first hand.

"I'm not worried about being shot," said MacArthur, who had won a Medal of Honor and been recommended for two others strictly on the ground.

"The only thing that disturbs me . . . is the possibility my stomach might get upset. I'd hate to throw up and disgrace myself in front of the kids."

Bravery and vanity were just two of the many sides of Douglas MacArthur: combat hero, superintendent of West Point, adviser to the Philippine army, and commander of American forces in the Southwest Pacific.

The book's title comes from Franklin D. Roosevelt's early assessment of MacArthur, viewed by many Republicans as a potential presidential candidate and by FDR as a potential right-wing demagogue.

Roosevelt made the remark after MacArthur's disastrously clumsy rout of hapless veterans camped out in Washington, D.C., in 1932 seeking payment of a World War I bonus.

Roosevelt was the Democratic candidate for president at the time and MacArthur was the Army chief of staff. His aide, Maj. Dwight D. Eisenhower, later summed up his reaction to his boss' decision to lead the troops as follows: "I told that dumb son-of-a-bitch not to go down there. I told him it was no place for the Chief of Staff."

But after Roosevelt's election, he and MacArthur began a long, testy, but ultimately productive relationship that lasted until FDR died in 1945. Roosevelt not only utilized MacArthur's brilliance (with some exceptions) as a military tactician, he also used his conservative credentials to blunt conservative critiques that he was shortchanging the military.

His patience was often stretched thin, as when the general's scorned mistress was quoted in the press as saying he referred to Roosevelt as "that cripple in the White House." But it never broke. And perhaps with good reason.

While MacArthur was described by a British officer as "shrewd, proud, remote, highly strung and vastly vain," Perry writes, "he was also experienced, courageous, imaginative, a brilliant organizer, the sole senior American officer who had actually commanded large formations in wartime."

The paragraph comes as the author describes one of the most intriguing aspects of the war: FDR's order that MacArthur be evacuated from the island of Corregidor in the Philippines before the Japanese could take its occupants prisoner.

Roosevelt may well have been planning to put MacArthur in charge of Allied forces in the Southwestern Pacific, as he eventually did, but Perry says that the real force behind the move was Australian Prime Minister John Curtin, who wanted a high-profile leader in charge to reassure his country that the fight in Pacific wasn't being downgraded in favor of the battle in Europe. At the time, Perry says, Curtin was threatening Winston Churchill with removing Australian troops from the North African theater and bringing them home.

It is nuggets like these that make the book so rewarding, partly because so many aspects of the MacArthur story are well-known: The bonus march, his vow that "I [not we] shall return" to the Philippines, and, of course, his firing in 1950 by Roosevelt's successor Harry S. Truman, who had a shorter fuse than FDR and certainly didn't need MacArthur as badly.

Particularly in the early years of the war, before American factories began turning out enough planes, ships, and tanks to reverse the tide of battle, the fight for resources between and within the services was fierce. This was particularly true in the Pacific, where supplies of men and material were particularly short because Roosevelt's chief aim at the time was keeping Russia in the war to battle Germany in Eastern Europe.

"In stark contrast to the campaigns in Europe," Perry writes, "MacArthur and [Admiral Chester] Nimitz were required to plan and execute complex military operations that involved the coordination of land, sea and air assets to a degree unprecedented in American military history."

MacArthur, Nimitz, Air Force chief Henry R. "Hap" Arnold, and Ernest King, the brilliant but choleric chief of naval operations, sometimes threw elbows at each other with just about as much energy as they threw them at the Japanese.

It fell to Roosevelt and his Army chief of staff, George C. Marshall, "to impose cooperation between Allied militaries in Europe and differing military services in the Pacific. For while the alliance between the Americans and the British in Europe and the army and navy in the Pacific might threaten to unravel at any moment, the absolute necessity [was] for everyone to work together."

Perry is far from an artful writer, but he clearly describes how the personalities - not just the top leaders like MacArthur, but the key men under them - eventually meshed to develop and carry out a winning strategy in the Pacific.