It was pure MacArthur, father and son. Douglas became a first lieutenant.4
Life became easier as a result. His superiors weren’t as inclined to waste the son of the great Arthur MacArthur on tedious and dangerous duties out in the jungle as a first lieutenant. He settled down to a series of desk jobs as assistant to the chief engineer in Manila—although he was also sent out to survey the harbor at Mariveles, at the tip of the Bataan Peninsula, where he concluded that Aguinaldo had been right to plan to make his last stand in that rough, rugged terrain.
It never crossed his mind that three and a half decades later, forces under his command would be making their own last stand there, against a foe far deadlier than Aguinaldo.
In the evenings Douglas had time to come back to Manila, where he had been made a member of the Army and Navy Club, and where one evening he had dinner with two young Filipino lawyers who would play a major part in his later career. One was Sergio Osmeña, who would join MacArthur in the first landing in the Philippines in 1944 and would become the country’s first president after the defeat of Japan.
The other was Manuel Quezon, a striking twenty-eight-year-old who had been Aguinaldo’s chief aide but who had abandoned the insurrection after his master’s capture. Quezon was part of a growing generation of young Eastern intellectuals who had learned to resent the dominance of white colonial powers over their peoples and were looking for ways to break free from dependence on the West while still retaining its respect. Quezon’s greatest dream before and after the Spanish-American War was the independence of his country; if he couldn’t do it by driving the Americans out, he concluded, then he would have to do it with their help. He had been impressed by the generosity of the postwar administration toward Filipinos, and by the work of reconstruction that Arthur MacArthur had begun.5 Like his contemporary Sun Yat-sen, Quezon believed that Western-style politics, and a Western-style constitution, would make his people free and happy. He was on the lookout for American allies who could make it happen, and in his encounter with Douglas MacArthur he found one that he relied on until his death.
As for Douglas, the days when he wasn’t on Bataan he was able to wander Manila’s ancient winding streets. He walked past the stone-and-stucco houses, explored Intramuros’s shops and lively market stalls, and rode the rickshaws (a mode of transport imported from Japan) that took a foreign visitor anywhere he wanted to go in the blazing heat of midday. Later he would remember with enthusiasm those palmy days, “the delightful hospitality, the respect and affection expressed for my father…and the languorous laze that seemed to glamorize even the most routine chores of life, the fun-loving men, the moonbeam delicacy of its lovely women, fastened me with a grip that has never relaxed.”6
Unfortunately, the grip of malaria did not relax either, and in October he was ordered home to recover. He would spend a year in San Francisco recuperating, with light duties supervising the Golden Gate harbor defenses. The rest of his time was devoted to chatting with his mother, traveling on horseback in the high country of the Sierra Nevada as part of a commission assigned to clean up the debris left by placer mining for gold—and dreaming of the lush languor and moonbeam-delicate ladies of the Philippines. They were days when it must have seemed as if he were drowning in honey—and perhaps boredom.
Then on October 5, 1905, a telegram arrived that would transform his life. It was from the army’s acting chief of staff and was headed “Special Order 222.”
It ordered MacArthur to be relieved of all duties and to proceed forthwith to Tokyo, Japan. There he would be aide-de-camp to the acting American military attaché, who had arrived there seven months earlier. That attaché was none other than his father, Major General Arthur MacArthur.7
It was a dream come true for Lieutenant Douglas MacArthur: serving full-time in an official capacity with the father he worshiped. For Arthur MacArthur, it was a dream come true for other reasons. The job he had applied for in vain more than twenty years earlier was now his, except it was in Japan rather than China—a change that represented a rapid shift in the balance of power in Asia.
Back in February, Japan had launched a surprise naval attack on Port Arthur, a Russian-held outpost in what had been Chinese Manchuria. The Russo-Japanese War was on, and from his desk in San Francisco Arthur MacArthur watched its progress with growing fascination. The Japanese had used a new military technology, the torpedo, to cripple the Russian fleet at Port Arthur; at the end of March their new modern navy wiped out the Russian fleet at Vladivostok, while Russian and Japanese armies battled back and forth using the new technologies of modern land war like the land mine, the field mortar, and the machine gun.
Arthur MacArthur grasped that point at once, and put in a request for assignment to the Far East as a military observer. His hope was to witness at least one major battle and study the field organization of the Japanese army.8 MacArthur’s appointment that December lent seniority to a delegation of American officers already headed for Tokyo, including three of MacArthur’s own protégés: Colonel Enoch Crowder, his former adjutant; Major Peyton March, who had risen from the field artillery to become another MacArthur aide; and Captain John J. Pershing, who had also served with MacArthur in the Philippines and was destined to be a rising star in the modern army.
On February 14, 1905, just as their son was settling into his desk duties in Manila, Arthur and Pinky set sail from San Francisco aboard the SS Korea. Also on board were Captain Pershing and his wife, and a friendship blossomed between the Pershings and the MacArthurs that would later bear strange fruit for their son Douglas.
They reached Yokohama on March 5, and when they arrived in Tokyo General MacArthur found to his surprise that he was the center of enormous attention. Japan’s generals had studied his campaigns in the Philippines with intense interest, especially his war of rapid maneuver against the Philippine National Army. They had even adopted some of his tactics for their own campaign against the Russians in Manchuria, which reached a climax on March 8 at the Battle of Mukden—the same day the government held an enormous banquet in MacArthur’s honor.
The banquet was regularly interrupted by hourly bulletins reporting the fighting at Mukden, prompting loud cheers from the Japanese attendees as the battle steadily tipped in Japan’s favor. By the time the MacArthurs and Pershings returned to the Imperial Hotel, crowds filled the streets chanting “Banzai!” as the full extent of the victory became clear. Japan’s rank as a great power was complete.9
Arthur MacArthur did not see any battles firsthand or modern weapons like machine guns used in action, but he did arrive in time to watch the Japanese mop up isolated pockets of Russian resistance, while the trip from Dairen, the main Japanese supply base in Manchuria, to Mukden revealed the dismal detritus of war: smashed villages, abandoned artillery and supply wagons, and thousands of unburied dead Russian soldiers.10
The Japanese let him talk to Russian prisoners of war who, at the time, were treated far better than the prisoners they would take from his son’s army.11 He also met the Japanese victors, including the commander of all Japanese forces in Manchuria, Field Marshal Oyama Iwao, and General Kuroki Tametomo, commander of the Japanese First Army, with whom Arthur MacArthur remained friends for the rest of his life. At every level, MacArthur found the Japanese to be superior soldiers than their Russian rivals. If anything, he was on the verge of becoming a true Nipponophile—and the Japanese Army on the verge of finding a new idol in the person of General Arthur MacArthur.
When MacArthur returned to Tokyo in August, however, he discovered that the general mood regarding Americans had abruptly changed.
Japan’s victory on land at Mukden had been followed in May by victory at sea in the Tsushima Strait separating Korea and Japan, when Japanese admiral Togo sank or captured thirty-two of the thirty-five ships in the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet, which had traveled 18,000 miles to encounter complete and humiliating annihilation (total Japanese losses were 110 sailors). But then President Theodore Roosevelt decided
it was time to bring Russia’s string of defeats to an end and intervene—not with ships or soldiers, but with a pen.
He summoned the Russian and Japanese ambassadors from Washington to his vacation home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where under the president’s watchful eye, they agreed to a peace treaty with Russia surrendering Manchuria and North Korea to Japan. Roosevelt saw the treaty as a way to maintain the complex and shifting balance of power between Japan and Russia—as well as a way to exert American influence in Asia for the first time. The Japanese, however, were furious at Roosevelt’s compromise because it cheated them of the full fruits of victory. It also left Japan with an enormous war debt, which the government in Tokyo had told the Japanese public would be paid off by the Russians as part of a war indemnity.
Huge anti-American demonstrations broke out across the country, and hundreds of Japanese committed suicide over what they saw as a national humiliation.12 Gazing from his hotel room at the angry crowds and anti-American signs, Arthur MacArthur realized his welcome in Japan was over (his own physical resemblance to Roosevelt, down to the barrel chest, bristling mustache, and pince-nez, certainly didn’t help matters). Time to go, but to where?
There could be only one answer in his mind: the Philippines. He had already sent that wish on to the administration, which was why Taft was in Tokyo at the same time. He hoped to block MacArthur’s return to the Philippines. During their time together the two men had clashed bitterly over American policy in the islands, especially on the issue of Philippine independence: Arthur MacArthur was a keen believer in granting it at once, while Taft and the rest of the Roosevelt administration preferred to wait. So rather than allow his rival to return to the Philippines and restore his influence there, Taft proposed an alternative. Why didn’t MacArthur take an officially sanctioned tour of Asia, with his able young son Douglas as his military aide?
Surprised and delighted, MacArthur accepted on the spot. He forgot about returning to the Philippines (as Taft had hoped he would). This tour would not only reunite Pinky and him with their youngest son, but it would also allow his son to get his first look at the future face of modern war—not in Europe, where no one anticipated any military conflict, but in Asia, the crucible of empire building and America’s future influence.
So the telegram had gone out to San Francisco, and on Sunday, October 29, 1905, Douglas MacArthur arrived in Japan for the first time. It was more than forty years before he would return.
At the time, “I was deeply impressed by and filled with admiration for the thrift, courage, and friendliness” of the ordinary Japanese, Douglas remembered, while the city of Tokyo itself would have galvanized his imagination with its strange contrasts between old and new. Trains and smokestacked factories surrounded the outskirts of Tokyo, while businessmen and officials dressed in suits and top hats bustled through the streets of the Ginza and Marunouchi districts just as they did in New York’s Wall Street. Yet around the corner barefoot peddlers and rickshaws crammed ancient alleyways, along with men and women in kimonos, like scenes from a Japanese scroll painting. He also met many Japanese army officers—“grim, taciturn, aloof men of iron character and unshakeable purpose”—as well as the victor of Tsushima, Admiral Togo.13
The young lieutenant was also impressed by the ferocious discipline imposed on the Japanese soldier, especially the ordinary private. As one recruit later remembered, “Personality ceased to exist, there was only rank. You became lowest of the low, condemned to cook, clean, drill, and run from dawn to dusk. You could be beaten for anything—being too short or too tall, even because somebody didn’t like the way you drank coffee….Each man was schooled to accept unquestioningly the order of his group leader”—and above all the will of the emperor.14
One story in particular stuck in MacArthur’s mind many years later. To combat an outbreak of beriberi, the government distributed a pill with the label: “to prevent beriberi take one pill three times a day.” Like soldiers everywhere, MacArthur remembered, “they took the pill once, spat it out, then dumped the can into the mud.” The surgeon in charge was stumped until a bright young officer suggested a new label: “The Emperor desires you to take one pill three times a day.” The problem was solved: every pill was taken exactly as ordered. In fact, “[n]othing but death itself could stop the soldiers from taking the medicine.”15
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But the tour of military Japan was just the curtain-raiser for what Douglas MacArthur admitted later was “without doubt the most important factor of preparation in my entire life,” in some respects even more important than West Point: an eight-month tour of Asia, from November 1905 to June 1906, that started in Singapore and ended back in Japan.
What Douglas MacArthur saw was the Asia that the European colonial powers had made, at the very end of the Victorian era. But he also saw the abundant opportunities for America to exert its commercial, military, and cultural muscle, once it had committed itself to a decisive turn to the Far East. In the words of Albert Beveridge, “the power that rules the Pacific…is the power that rules the world.” To the MacArthurs, both father and son, that power was destined to be the United States.
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The first stop on the tour was Singapore on November 23.16 Founded in 1819, it was the main trading post for Great Britain in Asia, even greater than Hong Kong—and the military bastion of Britain’s possessions east of India. Arthur and Douglas MacArthur met the British governor and reviewed the British troops on the island city. Then they toured other military bases on the Malay Peninsula, before settling sail for Djakarta in the Dutch East Indies on November 28.
The future capital of Indonesia, Djakarta (or Batavia, as the Dutch named it) bore the physical traces of a long colonial history, with European-style whitewashed buildings and houses, some dating back to the seventeenth century. The Dutch also maintained an impressive garrison of Dutch and native troops. But as with Singapore and other stops, MacArthur saw firsthand “the strengths and weakness of the colonial system,” he wrote, “how it brought law and order, but failed to develop the masses along the essential lines of education and political economy.”
As he walked the streets with his mother striding sturdily beside him, he “rubbed elbows with millions of underprivileged who knew nothing about economics or democracy” or anything else, but who were “interested only in getting a little more food in their stomachs, a little better coat on their backs, a little stronger roof over their heads.”17 A system of government that promised more of all three, he realized, would mean more to ordinary Asians than any promises of constitutions or self-governance—or even civil liberties. It was a lesson that enabled him to understand the appeal of Communism in Asia after 1945, as well as the need for America and the West to forge the material and cultural, as well as military, tools to combat it.
The MacArthurs’ time in the Dutch East Indies passed slowly. This was due in part because of “tropical heat and irregular connections,” General MacArthur noted, but also because with his usual thoroughness he insisted on visiting no fewer than twelve military bases, covering 1,200 miles by train and carriage in a little over three weeks.18 The trio then returned briefly to Singapore for Christmas before setting out for Burma. They traveled first to Mandalay in Upper Burma, which Winston Churchill’s father, Randolph, had added to the British Empire in 1892, before traveling by steamer to what would be the heart of their Asian tour, India.
Starting on January 14 in Calcutta, the MacArthurs would spend nearly eight weeks in India, seeing everything from Calcutta and the Himalayas to Ceylon, Bangalore, the Northwest Frontier, and the Khyber Pass bordering on Afghanistan, while stopping at virtually every military installation along the way. “In order to expedite my observations,” General MacArthur informed Washington, “all the Generals concerned practically put their commands under emergency orders.” What he and Douglas witnessed was the deployment of the largest all-volunteer army in the world, nearly a quarter million strong and made up of every race and r
eligion in India, with a small but sturdy cluster of British regiments to round out the force. The Indian army was the military juggernaut of Asia, and a reminder to both MacArthurs of what an alliance of Western and Eastern soldiers could accomplish, given enough resources and motivation.19
At the time, however, what Douglas particularly relished was the conversations between his father and the Indian army’s commander in chief, Lord Kitchener. The greatest living British soldier and the greatest living American soldier (certainly in Douglas’s mind) shared memories of past and present battles, including those with their own governments. Kitchener himself was in the midst of an imbroglio with the viceroy Lord Curzon about which he discoursed at bitter length. No doubt it also reminded Arthur MacArthur of his own problems dealing with William Howard Taft in the Philippines. Douglas’s memoirs state that both men gave him a foretaste “of the age-old struggle between the civil and the military to fix the exact line of demarcation between executive control and the professional duty of the soldiers” while leaving him little doubt who should prevail, and who had no business prevailing, in that struggle.20
By the time the MacArthurs left India, they had logged no fewer than 19,000 miles of travel. But there was still more to come, including a stop in the one remaining independent power in Southeast Asia, Siam (today Thailand). They arrived in Bangkok on March 27, 1906, where their reception by King Chulalongkorn* and a formal dinner in their honor led American ambassador Hamilton King to report that “no man has been accorded such a royal and generous welcome as was the General since I have been in this country.”21
According to a recently discovered diary kept by King’s wife, the MacArthurs spent virtually every day touring military barracks, schools, and prisons in the Siamese interior, traveling by private railcar to Ratchapuri, the province west of Bangkok bordering Burma, with a Siamese aide-de-camp, before joining the entire party on a “picnic boat” to see the largest sitting Buddha in the world at Ayutthaya.
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