McArthur was born January 26, 1880 to parents who both had military backgrounds. His mother who most called Pinkey, was from well to do Virginia parents. His father was already a rather famous U.S. Army officer. Compared to most famous people, Douglas McArthur lived what I would call four whole lives. He was a commander in three major wars. Therefore, in relating to you his amazing life, it will be necessary to convey it to you in sections or posts. Following is the Third one.
Ron
MacArthur returned to the War Department, where he was promoted to Major on 11 December 1915. In June 1916, he was assigned as head of the Bureau of Information at the office of the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker. MacArthur has since been regarded as the Army’s first press officer.
Following the declaration of war on Germany on 6 April 1917 and the subsequent American entry into World War I, Baker and MacArthur secured an agreement from President Wilson for the use of the National Guard on the Western Front in France where they knew any Americans entering the war would be sent.
As you probably know, the National Guard was composed of soldiers from each individual state. MacArthur suggested sending a division organized from units of different states, so as to avoid the appearance of favoritism toward any particular state.
MacArthur described it as a rainbow of colors from each state flag, and as a result it was named the Rainbow Division because of MacArthur’s description. Baker approved the creation of this formation, which became the 42nd (“Rainbow”) Division and appointed Major General William Abram Mann, the head of the National Guard Bureau, as its commander. MacArthur was its chief of staff, and with his new role came the rank of colonel, skipping the rank of lieutenant colonel.
At MacArthur’s request, this new Division was placed in the infantry rather than the engineers.
From its formation atMacArthur receiving the French Croix de Guerre medal from General Bazelairein August 1917, MacArthur was the division’s key sparkplug, prime motivator, and individual most responsible for its creation. Competent, efficient, innovative, highly intelligent, and tirelessly energetic, as division chief of staff MacArthur appeared everywhere, at all hours – badgering, cajoling, inspiring, intervening, and attending to every detail, large and small.
It sailed in a convoy from Hoboken, New Jersey, for the Western Front on 18 October 1917. On 19 December the 42nd’s commander, the 63-year-old Mann, was replaced by 55-year-old Major General Charles T. Menoher, after Mann–who was “ill, old, and bedridden”–[41] failed a physical examination. The new division commander and his chief of staff “became great friends”, in MacArthur’s words, who further described Menoher as “an able officer, an efficient administrator, of genial disposition and unimpeachable character”.
In 1917 Fance’s most striking geographic feature was a double chain of snakelike trenches which began on the English Channel and ended 466 miles away on the Swiss border. Facing one another across the no-man’s land between these earthworks the great armies squatted in the western front amid the stench of urine, feces, and decaying flesh, living lives in candlelit dugouts and sandbagged ditches hewn from chalk or clay, or scooped from the porridge of swampy Flanders.
They had been there since the summer of 1914 when the gray tide of the German army had swept through Belgium and lapped at the very gates of Paris. The titanic struggles which followed had been called battles, but although they had been fought on a fantastic scale, with nearly two million men lost at Verdun and on the Somme, strategically they were only siege assaults. Every attack found the defenses of the Kaiser’s troops stronger. The Tommies who crawled out of their filthy trenches, lay down in front of the jump-off tapes, and waited for their officers’ zero-hour whistles, would face as many as ten aprons or sections of barbwire with barbs thick as a man’s thumb, and then the multitude of German water-cooled machine guns.
A few trenches would be taken at shocking cost. In one typical attack, one gain of seven hundred mutilated yards cost 26 thousand men, and then the sieges back and forth would start again.
It was a weird, grimy life, unlike anything in their sheltered upbringing. Most sounds and colors on the front were unearthly. Bullets cracked and ricochets sang with an iron ring; overhead, shells warbled endlessly. There were saffron shrapnel puffs, shaky yellowish mists of mustard gas souring the ground, and spectacular Very flares of all hues.
Arriving draftees were shipped up in boxcars to their new homes in the earth, where everything revolved around the trench—you had a trench knife a trench cane, a rod-shaped trench periscope and, if you were unlucky, trench foot, trench mouth, or trench fever.
Even in uncontested sectors there was a steady toll of shellfire casualties. The methodical British called it “normal wastage.” Such shellings were symbolic of the whole conflict—grotesque, impersonal, obscene, ghastly. The war was, quite simpley the worst thing that had ever happened.
Despite the unparalleled horror—the insanities of World Was II, Korea, and Vietnam never quite matched the madness of World War I.
After it was all over, in 1919 a colonel who hadn’t been overseas wrote of MacArthur that it was “hard for me to conceive of this sensitive, high-strung personage slogging in the mud, enduring filth, living in stinking clothing and crawling over jagged soil under criss-crosses of barbed wire to have a bloody clash with a bestial enemy.” The explanation was that men like MacArthur, raised to believe in Victorian heroism, invested even the nightmare of trench warfare with extravagant thoughts of fantastic glory.
With General Charles Meneher as its ranking officer, the 42nd (Rainbow) division was sent immediately to the Western Front upon its arrival in France. Everyone knew that the Germans were planning a big Spring offensive. American units were desperately needed. Pershing ordered the 42nd into the Luneville sector on the Lorraine plain.
With MacArthur as its Chief of Staff, he was second in command and, with some of the Division already going into the trenches, of course he was there with them instead of being back of the lines with the other ranking officers. MacArthur was meticulous in organization and consummate in planning. More and more he was delegating authority for operations, intelligence, and administration to majors and lieutenant colonels. There was a kind if madness in his method: he wanted the staff to be self-sufficient so that he would be free to cross no-man’s-land with assault troops.
One of the first things that he heard was that a group of French commandos were planning and excursion or raid across no-man’s-land to the German trenches on February 24, 1918. Knowing that he needed experience in this type of warfare and anxious to get into the fight, he asked for permission to accompany them from General Georges de Bazelaire. He was turned down but when he argued: “I cannot fight them if I cannot see them,” he was finally given permission.
Next morning at daylight he is right there, ready for the excursion. However, to the amazement of the other participants he is not dressed in the required uniform like the rest. Typical of MacArthur, he is dressed in his cavalry riding britches, his scrunched-down cap instead of the steel helmet, his riding boots polished to a mirror finish, a four foot muffler knitted by his mother, a turtle neck sweater, and only a riding crop instead of any other weapon.
Captain Thoms Hardy, one of General Menoher’s aids asked to go along with him. When he asked about MacArthur’s outlandish attire, MacArthur remembered his father and told him “It’s the orders you disobey that make you famous.”
The French soldiers were daubing sticky black mud on their faces. MacArthur and Handy followed their example, and also accepted the loan of wire cutters and trench knives from a French lieutenant
Upon the signal to advance, a tossed grenade, he started across no-man’s-land in front of those French commandos, leading them through all the barbed wire, machine gun fire and across and around the plethora of shell holes.
He got to the edge of the German trenches first and peered down. Then the French soldiers caught-up and peered down also. They wondered what should be their next move. They did not have long to wait, for MacArthur jumped down into the German trench and yelled for them to follow. They shot the surprised Germans right and left. However, MacArthur rounded up a group of Germans as prisoners, including a high ranking German Colonel in his fancy German officer’s uniform.
When they had done about all the damage they could do there, MacArthur led them back across no-man’s-land. He was standing upright and prodding the German colonel along in front of him with his riding crop. When he approached the allied trenches, with that German officer still being prodded along, a huge cheer went up from the Rainbow division men that were already there as well as an equally rousing cheer from the French soldiers. In his words, Frenchmen “crowded around me, shaking my hand, slapping me on the back , and offering me cognac and absinthe.”
General de Bazelaire pinned a Croix de Guerre on him and kissed him on both cheeks. This was the first ever Croix de Guerre awarded to a member of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). Menoher, awarded him the silver star afterward, and told a New York Times war correspondent: “Colonel MacArthur is one of the ablest officers in the United States Army and one of the most popular.
MacArthur receiving the French Croix de Guerre medal from General Bazelaire
Be Prepared for Fourth Installment
True Texan Tales 