"Bring Home MacArthur!"

Wendell Willkie put the feeling about Douglas MacArthur into words: "We are now engaged in fighting a modern war against the greatest exponents of modern warfare. . . . To bring about effective cooperation, one man should direct the military services. . . . We have the man--the man who . . . almost alone has given his fellow countrymen confidence and hope . . . General Douglas MacArthur."

Cried Willkie: "Bring home General MacArthur. . . . Put him in supreme command of our armed forces, under the President." With the air of a man who has been groping for a word and hears it unexpectedly from a passerby, the U.S. echoed Willkie in the press, in Congress, on the street. But it was not simply a matter of putting an advertisement in the paper: "General MacArthur--please come home. . . ."

To rescue MacArthur might take ships or seaplanes in force. Such an expedition could end in disaster. The General's wife and his young son (Arthur, 4) are with him. So are High Commissioner Francis B. Sayre, his wife, and Manuel Quezon, President of the Philippines. Could MacArthur leave them? Could he leave his men?

The Navy has a tradition that a captain goes down with his ship. The Army takes it for granted that an officer will not desert his men. In the field, a general's authority is supreme. Men who know MacArthur say that in Luzon, as at St. Mihiel,* he will fight his campaign precisely as he pleases. Even if he were ordered back, he might well, say Army men, "fail to see" the order.

MacArthur seemed to be doing all right where he was. It looked as if the U.S. would have to do without MacArthur.

* Where he set up headquarters in the front line's farthest fringe, refused to take advice to move back, left only when German artillery found his range.

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