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Back home, and back to the Lieutenant-Coloneley with which he entered the War, "Doug" MacArthur shone in the social firmament of post-War Washington. He entered the competition for the hand of vivacious Louise Cromwell, step-daughter of potent Edward T. Stotesbury, and won. General Pershing's aide lost, which did not ease the friction which still exists between the Chief of Staff and the retired General of the Armies. Known as the "Kid General" during the War, MacArthur was given command first of the Fourth Corps Area, then of the Third, a time-killing process necessary before he could reasonably be made Chief of Staff. The year he took the Army's highest job his divorced wife married Actor Lionel Atwill.
"Four Army Plan." General MacArthur's trips to Europe in 1931 and 1932 were not quite the pleasure junkets which gossips imagined. He was investigating with the concentration of his student days the organization plans of foreign armies. Nor did his conventional forays into Washington society (he much prefers less formal fun) give proper perspective to the long evenings spent at his office and home across the Potomac at Fort Myer, digesting and arranging the material he had gathered. Result of these studies was his ''Four-Army Plan" of mobilization and command.
"Until 1932," according to the General, "there was no complete chain of tactical control paralleling the administrative system represented in the corps area commands. Consequently the American Army, if mobilized for field service, would have comprised . . . simply a collection of skeletonized divisions, each reporting directly to the War Department."
With the executive genius for which RKO wanted to pay him $30,000 a year if he would leave the Service, General MacArthur grouped the nine corps areas into four army areas: (1) North Atlantic States, (2) Upper Mississippi Basin, (3) Southern & Southwestern States, (4) Western. & Northwestern States. In emergency, these four Field Armies would probably be placed in command of the Army's ranking generals. Each corps commander would still function within his own "zone of the interior," attending to matters of mobilization, supply, training and transport on his own familiar ground, while his Army commander took over the broader "theatre of operations." Designed to "place emphasis upon instant availability of a maximum proportion of existing forces," the Four-Army Plan eliminates much costly delay and confusion during the early and critical days of conflict. Such an innovation, calling for reorganization and amplification of the echelons of command from G. H. Q. down, required tireless indoctrination and was not accomplished merely by issuing a general order. A comparable task would be scrambling and rewiring under an entirely different system New York City's telephone exchange.
In New Jersey last autumn the plan received its first field test. Troops were not used, but lines of communication and Staffs were actually set up by the First and Second Army commands, to operate under War conditions.