Read Online The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur by Mark Perry - Free Book Online Page B

of tanks and bombers in the U.S. arsenal. But he had not yet constructed a model to explain how these newer, bigger, and more lethal machines would be used. So beginning in August 1934, the distant, alien, and still unwanted figure of the Roosevelt administration, the man who came, smiled, and then left White House receptions—and who did battle with congressman Ross Collins—simply disappeared. Not only did MacArthur not show up for work at his office late in the morning, as was his habit, but some days, he didn’t show up at all. Instead, he spent day after day by himself, in his library at Quarters Number One, his official residence across the Potomac River at Fort Myer. He was reading.
     
    D ouglas MacArthur’s command of facts was prodigious. As a commander in the Great War, he studied intelligence documents and briefed his subordinates on their contents. He spoke of the strength of the enemy, its commanders, its weaponry, its defenses, the terrain features the Americans would encounter, the plan they should follow, the obstacles they would face—and all without the use of a single note. MacArthur read voraciously, a habit seeded in a childhood surrounded by books. Arthur MacArthur owned a library of some fourthousand volumes, which his son inherited. These books the son moved, box by box, through each of his assignments until finally, when he was named chief of staff, they adorned the shelves of his Fort Myer home. To these MacArthur proudly added his own collection of military memoirs, biographies, and popular histories. A remnant of that early collection remains today at the MacArthur archives in Norfolk, Virginia. Included are dozens of volumes that MacArthur read in late 1934, as he searched for a strategy that the army might adopt in a future war.
    Among the volumes of books that MacArthur read during the late summer of 1934 were the classic standards of any military library: Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Jomini. But they stand relatively pristine next to the several dozen well-thumbed accounts of Napoleon’s campaigns. For the nonspecialist, these are dense tomes, minute-by-minute accounts of the movements of regiments and brigades, divisions and entire armies, complete with maps. For an era consumed with endless recollections of America’s own Civil War, including biographies of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Ulysses S. Grant, MacArthur’s tastes were decidedly European. It was Napoleon, and not Lee or Jackson, whom he admired, quoted, followed. Throughout his life, MacArthur cited and repeated Napoleon’s aphorisms, made continued references to his campaigns and battles, outlined his thinking, reviewed the accounts of his numerous victories—and referred to him again and again as history’s greatest captain. What MacArthur admired in Napoleon was his ability to handle enormous numbers of troops over vast distances. More than simply a matter of giving orders, Napoleon’s skill involved an intimate knowledge of how well the soldiers could pin an enemy in place and then surround it, force its retreat, or position it for annihilation. “Are you lucky?” Napoleon would ask his commanders—and so, too, throughout his career, would MacArthur.
    Historians cannot know the inner lives of their subjects, but the inner life of Douglas MacArthur undoubtedly lies somewhere in the pages of those books in Norfolk. In the late summer of 1934, he spent every day reading through them, conducting a quiet and personal military tutorial. Slowly, but inexorably, what he read was reflected in his reports to George Dern and Franklin Roosevelt. In the midst of his studies, he wrote to Dern that he believed the next war would be dominatedby tanks and aircraft, a wholly unique view for a veteran of the ghastly inch-by-inch trench fighting of World War One: “The nation that does not command the air will face deadly odds. Armies and navies to operate successfully must have air cover.” The shift in MacArthur’s thinking