Interview with Dr. Roger Olaf Egeberg: General Douglas MacArthur’s Personal Physician and Aide-De-Camp

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WWII: That was close! Did you discuss it with him later?

Egeberg: That night I asked why he did that. I told him I could see why he insisted that officers be in front, so they could better assess the situation. Then I said: ‘But why did you go 10 miles in front of our troops on your return to Bataan when you’d been told by our intelligence that 20 to 30 enemy tanks were only 200 yards from us?’ He said to me: ‘Doc, I used to think that I had a mission, that I would be spared to accomplish it. But I don’t believe that anymore.’ Then he smiled, ‘But today I was testing my timing.’ I felt sad and somewhat resentful toward him. After all, he had endangered me as well as himself He went on: ‘I left because I saw one enemy soldier say something to the other. Then they looked across at us. When they hunched their shoulders and started taking aim at us, I thought it was time to get out.’ I only told that story to my wife once. She really got angry when she heard it.

WWII: Speaking of wives, you know Jean MacArthur, the general’s wife, pretty well. What kind of person is she?

Egeberg: I still have lunch with Jean when I’m in New York. She’s 95 years old. She is a very loyal and very unpretentious woman. When she lived in Brisbane, she would go food shopping and there would be a line of ladies waiting to get their food. When they saw her, they would tell her to go to the front of the line. However, she never did. She stayed and talked to them. I’m sure she was the general’s real confidante. But whenever visitors from Washington would hound her with questions, she would always reply, ‘I only know what I read in the papers.’ I thought their questions were often rude. He had a lot of critics. For example, we landed four divisions abreast at Leyte. On the first day we were in the third wave heading toward White Beach. I may be wrong on the color–anyway, we landed and moved with the men. There was sniper fire, but MacArthur shrugged it off, saying, ‘They were left behind as snipers and couldn’t hit anything.’ Well, if you could have heard the bullets whizzing overhead or bouncing off the pavement, you would have thought differently. Then he left, and the next day he joined up with another unit on another beach, and so on and so forth. Well, people would pick up the paper and it would say, ‘MacArthur lands with troops at Leyte.’ One fellow would say: ‘He wasn’t here until the third day. That’s a lie!’ Well, he did land on D-day–but with another outfit. That’s the kind of gossip that made me mad.

WWII: So he did derive much of his strength from his wife.

Egeberg: Definitely. There were only two occasions that MacArthur chewed me out, and one of them was concerning Mrs. MacArthur. We had some general hospitals set up in Manila, and I asked the general to go through some wards. I thought it would boost morale. He shook his head: ‘I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I feel responsible for every man in those hospitals. I couldn’t stand it. Why don’t you take Jean.’ So I took Mrs. MacArthur to three hospitals. Mrs. MacArthur put on her white gloves for the occasion. The ward officer would conduct the tour. She would stop by each bed and greet the men with: ‘Hello, my name is Jean MacArthur, and I’m from Mufreesboro, Tennessee. Where are you from?’ Most were excited to talk to her and shake her hand. Except for one fellow who turned his face to the wall because he was embarrassed–his leg had been amputated below the knee. She wanted to get closer to the front, so I took her to a regimental field hospital that had been under shell fire. It was part of the 32nd Division. I called ahead and everything was all right. They had taken over an abandoned schoolhouse as a field hospital. They couldn’t believe the general’s wife was there. The next morning MacArthur called me in. He had found out I took her to this field hospital. He slammed his fist on the desk and hollered at me, ‘Doc, I don’t know what I’d do to you if anything happened to her.’ I know it wouldn’t have been a court-martial–it would’ve been death by strangulation.

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