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White and shaken, the young lieutenant picked himself up and examined his peaked campaign hat on the ground. The shot had torn it clean off his head. Even the tough top sergeant was moved. Said he: "With the lieutenant's kind permission, may I remark that the rest of the lieutenant's life is now on velvet."
Lieutenant Douglas MacArthur was fresh out of West Point in 1903, on assignment in the Philippines, and the first hostile bullets of his life scared him badly. Last week, 38 years later, General Douglas MacArthur was back in the Philippines fighting the toughest battle of his life. But he was not scared. As the bombs whistled down near him, an orderly tried to shoo him to a dugout. "Give me a cigaret, Eddie," said MacArthur, and went on watching.
To Douglas MacArthur it seemed scarcely strange that his life should have come full circle. Last year, trying to explain to a reporter how he felt about the Philippines, he roared: "When George Dewey sailed into Manila Bay on May 1, 1898 it was Manifest Destiny working itself out. By God, it was Destiny that brought me here! It was Destiny."
For Douglas MacArthur the Philippines are more than a battle assignment. The Philippines are in his blood. His father, Lieut. General Arthur MacArthur, swashbuckling boy hero of the Civil War, was military governor of the islands, 40 years ago; his mother died there; he himself has served three tours of duty there. Under Manila's tropic palms he wooed his second wife, 20 years his junior, and fathered his sturdy three-year-old son. The Philippines are the only home he has known since 1935, when he arrived to stake his professional reputation as a soldier on the thesis that the islands can be defended.
MacArthur's Philippines. When Douglas MacArthur took over the defense of the Philippines in 1935, he had all the honors a professional soldier could "want. He had been the youngest Chief of Staff in U.S. history, had served longer in that post than any other man (before or since). Neither the salary ($18,000 a year) nor the title (Field Marshal) bestowed on him by mercurial little President Manuel Quezon (who had surrendered his sword to MacArthur's father 40 years before) meant as much to him as the fact that the Philippines were a vital outpost of the U.S. defense.
MacArthur was almost alone in this opinion six years ago. The Neutrality Act and the Tydings-McDuffie Act (freeing the Philippines in 1946) expressed U.S. desire to cut its ties with an unhappy world. Moreover, almost all professional soldiers believed that the Philippines were a sore thumb stuck out in the Pacific that could be chopped off in one Japanese try. They wanted to get out. The Philippine Department of the U.S. Army was instructed to get ready to leave when Philippine independence arrived.
On Dec. 31, 1937 MacArthur retired from the U.S. Army. To the Philippine Commonwealth he had promised that by 1946 he would make of the islands a Pacific Switzerland that would cost any invader 500,000 men, three years and more than $5,000,000,000 to conquer.