08 January 2006

March of Dimes



The salmon was excellent, I must say, and the host was generous in filling my wineglass with an exuberant chardonnay. It led to one of those delightfully garrulous dinners of whimsy and history.

I will not reveal the participants, since plausible deniability is one of the pleasant fictions that maintain this string of cartoon balloons from the sultry city on the Potomac. It should be evident enough to the discerning reader, and if not, have another glass of wine. Relax and enjoy it.

It is always a treat to talk to the Admiral. He has been in this game since the threat to the West was named Hideki Tojo, and the Japanese had more than a million troops in China. He was on the staff of Chester Nimitz, and knew everyone who was everyone way back when, and all the ones who have come since.

He retains his keen eye for detail and human frailty, and his memory is crisp and precise.

The nature of crisis in the world is sad repetition. We are engaged in re-learning hard-won lessons right now, as the President prepares to tell us his brand-new strategy on Iraq, even as he has brought on the veterans of the last lost war to help him execute it.

Every time I run across a tough problem, I turn to my history books to see what the Greatest Generation did to respond in their time of crisis. They employed the very best minds, and were ruthless and implacable in their execution, and ultimately successful. That is the difference in the two generations that have come since. We are not that serious about anything, allowing a small number to serve as proxies in the conflict. Our attention span is short, and we are easily bored.

That said, for almost any situation there is a template of action that could be followed, if there was the will and the resources to do so.

There is a parallel path to the Greatest Generation. They saw the justification of their struggle, but did not rush into it. They had to have clear evidence of the perfidy of their foes. Once they knew, viscerally, they through near universal support and sacrifice behind the effort.

Of course that seems a bit quaint to us, raised on the cult of the anti-hero.

That is how I first got cross-wise with the Admiral. I had written something a little snide about General of the Army Douglas MacArthur. I figure I have the right, since “Doug-out Doug” was the General commanding who threw my Grandfather and his buddies off the National Mall and the Anacostia Flats during the Bonus Army's peaceful occupation of the city.

Besides, who cares that much for a General who has been in the ground since April of 1964?

I am respectful enough when I visit his tomb down in Norfolk. He was a great leader, and he accomplished many astonishing things in his memorable life. But still, he was an overbearing son-of-a-gun, and litany of his overwhelming sense of importance ranges all the way from his insistence that he be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to the most astonishing petty things.

We actually had to run two wars in the Pacific, the Navy one and the MacArthur one, since he had made a personal commitment to return to the Philippines, and that had to happen, regardless of the fact that the Navy had to deal with the Japanese elsewhere.

I won't flog that horse too hard. It is just is one of those stunning elements of history that no one ever taught you in school.

Anyhow, I had taken a sideswipe at General MacArthur one morning for the failure of his staff to take precautionary action to protect Clark Field, when they had hours of notification that the Japanese had hit Pearl Harbor. There were few long-range aircraft assigned to Hawaii. Most had been sent on due to the insistence of General MacArthur.

The Japanese pilots were surprised to find the American planes neatly lined up in rows to be destroyed.

The word had not been passed to the General, who had only been recalled from retirement to the active army a few months before. As “military advisor” the Philippines he had styled himself “Field Marshall,” and although he had once been a four-star Army Chief of Staff, he was now the three-star Commander of all forces in the Philippines.

These things meant an enormous amount to the General, but the President had called, and he answered.

Much would transpire in the weeks that followed the attack. The Philippine Islands fell to the Japanese war machine, as did everything in the Pacific north of Australia and west of Midway Island.

Ten days after the attack at Pearl Harbor, Chester Nimitz arrived to take command of the Pacific Fleet from Husband Kimmel, who would take the fall along with Lieutenant General Walter Short for the disaster. Nimitz wore four stars, and had responsibility for everything that did not belong to General MacArthur.

Admiral Nimtz was a brilliant but down-to-earth officer, strategic in thinking and common in manner. After a few encounters with the publicity-hungry MacArthur's staff, he issued a general order imposing silence on his staff, regardless of what issued from the Southwest Pacific. He would not countenance back-biting or internal disorder which could be harmful to the war effort.

That is what got me in minor trouble with the Admiral, and we laughed about it over dinner. I had violated an order of Chester Nimitz by criticizing the General!

He explained just how irritating it was to work with MacArthur's staff. He summed it up with a little story, and may be the last one around who knows it. When the five-star rank was established for the military leadership of world War Two, each officer was assigned a date of rank, one day apart. Seniority is everything in a military organization.

MacArthur had lobbied hard to ensure that his rank was a day ahead of Nimitz, even though it would be the Admiral who first signed the Japanese surrender. An emissary from Washington was en route the General's headquarters bearing the collar-devices to formally promote the General. They were Army style, with a metallic wreath around the lower portion of the pentagonal arrangement of stars.

The emissary's airplane encountered difficulties, and wound up at the Admiral's advanced headquarters on the island of Guam. He was treated with the Admiral's warm Texas hospitality, and the emissary, having nothing to give in return, presented the Admiral with General MacArthur's five star insignia. They were accepted with a smile.

You can never underestimate the power of raw ego, though. The stars had not arrived on December 17th, 1944, the day before the promotion to General of the Army was to be effective. The promotion would happen as scheduled, and the General was determined to be in the appropriate uniform.

Silver was scarce; there was a war on, after all. An order to march forward was issued. Accordingly, a Warrant Officer on his staff spent the night melting silver dimes down into ingots, from which he laboriously crafted the insignia for MacArthur to put on, a day ahead of Nimitz.

Sixty-two years later, I started to shake my head, but the Admiral would have none of it. It was one of the rules, he said, laughing. “Don't poke fun at MacArthur.”

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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