The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (16 page)

Arthur MacArthur was the son of a prominent and properly ambitious judge in Milwaukee. When the Civil War broke out, the judge tried to get his son into West Point. He even had one of Wisconsin’s senators take the boy to the White House to meet Abraham Lincoln. But all the slots were filled, and so the judge, using his private network of political connections, got his son a position as the regimental adjutant of the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin Regiment. At eighteen, Arthur MacArthur was an officer, though at first not everyone in the regiment was thrilled to have a boy adjutant. He first came to public prominence in November 1863 at the Battle of Missionary Ridge, near Chattanooga. The Confederates held the high ground there and had been chewing up a large Union force gathered beneath them, at very little cost to themselves. A diversionary attack, ordered by the Union commanders, led to ever heavier casualties among the extremely vulnerable Union troops until, as if reacting in rage to the unspeakable losses they were suffering, the Union soldiers drove recklessly right up the hill, in front of the well-dug-in Southerners, and evicted them.

They had been, it would turn out, led by the Twenty-fourth Wisconsin and the man—or rather the boy—carrying the regimental banner when they finally reached the top, perhaps the third or fourth soldier to pick it up after the others had been hit, Arthur MacArthur. General Phil Sheridan, the Union commander, thrilled by this surprise victory, allegedly said afterward that someone had better take good care of that lad with the banner because he had just won the Congressional Medal of Honor—though, in fact, Arthur
MacArthur did not actually gain that medal for another twenty-seven years. He fought in thirteen separate battles on Sherman’s March across Georgia and was wounded four times. He fought so well, in fact, that he was made a colonel at nineteen, the youngest soldier in the Union Army to reach that rank, becoming known as “the boy colonel” of the Civil War. He was brave, intelligent, and had a natural instinct for battle. After the war, he left the Army, but civilian life soon bored him and he returned to the service, though he had to give up his wartime rank.

He quickly made captain, and then went without any additional promotion for the next twenty-three years. Those were hard years of little external reward, save perhaps the experience itself. The country was pushing west, and more often than not he commanded on the country’s frontiers. The conditions were always primitive, and he operated in what were often largely lawless regions, or perhaps more accurately regions where the only law was what he said it was. The civilian political presence was often marginal, the restraints on a commander therefore minimal. To the degree that there were restraints, they were imposed upon the men in the field by politicians back in Washington, men who were not only distant but were regarded as innocents, unaware of the real world where the Army was doing the nation’s dirty work. To the men in the field the politicians they had to deal with were both compromised and compromising.

Arthur MacArthur was exceptionally successful in this frontier incarnation and confident in his use of troops in battle. Though he had little formal education, he was surprisingly well read and exceptionally confident of his intellectual abilities. His ability to operate without civilian challenge in those years only added to his existing arrogance, making him, as his son’s biographer William Manchester noted, particularly contemptuous of civilian authority—an attitude that was to get him into trouble in the Philippines and that, passed on from father to son, would turn the MacArthur family—father, mother, and son—ever more hostile to almost all politicians and yet, in a strange and bitterly ironic, almost unconscious way, ever more political.

In 1889, Arthur finally made major and went to Washington as assistant adjutant general. In 1897, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, he became a lieutenant colonel. When the war began in 1898, he hoped to be promoted to full colonel, and to command troops fighting the Spanish in Cuba, which was presumed to be the focal point of the confrontation between the United States, just beginning to feel its new economic muscle as the leading industrial power in the world, and Spain, a fading imperial power, one that had been in constant decline for much of a century. Instead of being promoted to colonel, Arthur was jumped two grades to brigadier general; instead of commanding troops in Cuba, he was sent to the Philippines.

William McKinley, an Ohio Republican with his own complex and conflicting feelings about America’s onrushing new role as an imperial power in the Pacific, was president. He was as surprised as anyone to discover that not only was he dealing with the suppression of a Cuban insurrection but that the United States’ easy success there had led to a larger and more complicated additional step in the Pacific. He found himself facing the far more difficult task of imposing America’s will on an indigenous uprising in Asia. There the local indigenous leaders wanted one thing—the Spanish imperialists gone. At first they welcomed American help, and then they found—it was part of the age—that the United States intended to do what was good for America and only then, for them as well; that is, create a new political order for them, albeit under U.S. rule and sovereignty.

It was the nation’s first real colonial experience and it was not a happy one. The first shots between American troops and Filipino rebels may have been fired in February 1899, eleven months before the millennium, but in terms of American power and ambitions, the brutal counterinsurgency campaign the United States fought in the Philippines heralded much of what was to happen in the coming century. The Americans moved into the archipelago almost casually, more as an adjunct to events in Cuba than anything else. When the fighting in Cuba began, Admiral George Dewey, the commander of the Pacific Fleet, had sailed the American fleet into Manila Bay to destroy the antiquated Spanish one. What he found, in effect, was the feeble remains of the Spanish empire. The Spanish colony of the Philippines, it would turn out, was there more or less for the taking, and so the United States took it.

President McKinley did not particularly want the islands. He could not, he told one friend, “have told where those darned islands were within two thousand miles.” But the pressure in the United States for some form of expansion, a continuation of that nineteenth-century sense of an American Manifest Destiny and an expression of the need to display to the rest of the world America’s new economic muscle, had its own momentum. If the United States needed some sort of proof of its mounting strength in those years, then it could be gotten from colonial possessions. Two basic impulses in America—one of military and political restraint, the other more bloodthirsty and acquisitive—were, not for the first time, in conflict, and the more hawkish impulse seemed to be winning. As the
Washington Post
noted, “A new consciousness seems to have come upon us—the consciousness of strength—and with it a new appetite, the yearning to show our…ambition, interest, land hunger, pride, the mere joy of fighting, whatever it may be, we are animated by a new sensation…. The taste of empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle. It means an imperial policy.”

America began the Philippine adventure as the ally—indeed almost the partner—of the rebels who were challenging the Spanish colonial regime and were fighting for their post-Spanish independence. The United States had assured them that Americans were noncolonial by their very nature. In time, the United States ended up fighting in a cruel and ugly war of suppression. Again two very powerful American instincts were evident—a missionary drive that demanded the United States assume colonial responsibility over the islands in order to civilize the natives as part of a Christian white man’s burden, and at the same time racism of the most virulent kind, so that the guerrillas were called either “niggers” or “gugus” (or “goo-goos”). The latter name came from the bark of a local tree that women used when they shampooed their hair. It was a term that eventually morphed into the more all-purpose word for Asians,
gooks,
that American troops used to identify Asians from World War II right through Korea and Vietnam.

To send in troops or not was the issue McKinley wrestled with, the forces around him always stronger than his own will. He himself appeared to come to the issue without strong convictions. In the end, he told one missionary group, in words that would have considerable resonance in future conflicts, he had sent the troops because he had no other acceptable choice. It had been a very hard decision, he said, and then he noted that he had knelt down in the White House to ask “almighty God for light and guidance.” After all, he said, he could not give the archipelago back to the Spaniards. That would be cowardly and dishonorable. Nor could he open it up for two other interested colonial predators, France or Germany. And he
certainly
could not let the Filipinos, childlike as they were, govern themselves. Therefore his only choice was to take them for America, so Americans could “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them as our fellow men for whom Christ died.”

The war itself was very different from those altruistic words. The Filipinos seemed quite unaware of the favors the United States intended to bestow upon them. The Americans at first tended to underestimate the Filipino insurgents, who knew the country far better than they did, generally had the support of the people, and soon took up arms against the foreigners not as regular infantry, but as guerrillas—and fought surprisingly well. The Americans had a slight superiority in weaponry, thanks to a new Norwegian-made rifle called the Krag-Jorgensen, which had the advantage of a five-round clip and used smokeless powder. That meant it did not give out a small puff of smoke when fired, making it harder for an enemy rifleman to mark the gun. “Underneath the starry flag/ Civilize them with a Krag,” went one of the songs sung by the American troops. What happened then was a forerunner of all too many
battles in Asia still to come: Americans who were contemptuous of their adversaries at first because they were not white found themselves quite surprised and quite embittered by the degree of resistance to their will. After the initial shots were fired, one American major had called to his superior, Colonel Frederick Funston, “Come on out here, Colonel. The ball has begun.” Some ball. The war turned out to be infinitely harder and more brutal than anyone expected. Like Arthur MacArthur, many of the American troops had come right off the frontier and out of the Indian wars: there as here the traditional hatred of an enemy was blended in with racial fears and hatreds. “This country won’t be pacified until the niggers are killed off like the Indians,” one soldier told a reporter. “The only good Filipino is a dead one,” another said. Some of the American commanders were greatly irritated, as their lineal descendants would be sixty years later in Vietnam, because their adversaries rarely fought in the open or in daytime where the Americans could see them. They were sly. They fought at night and they used ambushes. As the rebels took shelter in the indigenous population, the Americans turned with ever greater violence on that population, for there was to be no civilian neutrality in a war like this. What was supposed to be easy and to end quickly stretched on. Before it was over, some 112,000 American troops, 62,000 regulars and another 50,000 volunteers, were sent there.

The violence not only escalated, but it gradually became more vicious. One American brigadier general, Jacob (Hell-roaring Jake) Smith, told his subordinates, “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all prisoners killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.” One of his subordinates asked Smith to set an age limit. “Ten years,” said Smith. “Ten years?” asked the subordinate. “People of ten years old are able to bear arms against America?” “Yes,” said Smith. The war went on for three and a half years, less popular by the day in America. The end was expedited by a daring raid and the capture of Aguinaldo, the rebel leader, by General Funston in 1901. In the end, 4,200 Americans died in the Philippines and another 2,800 were wounded. Perhaps 20,000 Filipino soldiers died in the struggle, and as many as 250,000 civilians. “If old Dewey had just sailed away after he smashed that Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us,” McKinley told a friend afterward.

Major General Arthur MacArthur became the commander of the American forces in the Philippines in May 1900, replacing General Elwell Otis, whom he regarded with complete contempt. “A locomotive bottom side up on the track, with its wheels revolving at full speed” was the way he described Otis. He was more aggressive than Otis, and while he also pushed for political reform,
he was willing to use extreme force to destroy the guerrillas. There were bound to be tensions between him and Washington, given the absolute certitude in his mind-set over what ought to be done, and the comparable ambivalence in Washington. McKinley did not want to be pulled down in an endless, draining, increasingly unpopular war. Thus, he did not want to leave everything to the military on location. He looked instead for some kind of political solution. In 1901, he finally decided to send a five-man commission to the islands to work out a political settlement, and he chose his friend, William Howard Taft, an extremely able Ohio lawyer and judge, to lead it. Taft wanted no part of the Philippines. What he really wanted was a seat on the Supreme Court. If, however, he turned down the first, he feared the second might never come his way. An immense man who weighed some 320 pounds, Taft was in no way enthusiastic about going to Manila. “But Mr. President,” he said when they met, “I am sorry we have got the Philippines. I don’t want them and I think you ought to have some man who is more in sympathy with the situation.” “You don’t want them any less than I do,” McKinley answered, according to Taft, and then insisted that what he needed was a man he trusted out there representing him.