ABSTRACT
As attaché, Fellers was extremely energetic, conscientious, intelligent, and knowledgeable. A native of Illinois and a West Pointer, he had served three tours in the Philippines, where he adored the head of the American military mission, General Douglas MacArthur. In 1936 he sycophantically called MacArthur’s speech on taking command “a Sermon on the Mount, clothed in grim, present-day reality. I shall never forget it.” His passion for English-when assigned to teach mathematics at West Point, he transferred to the English department-shows in the clarity and precision of his “Psychology of the Japanese Soldier,” a paper he wrote after his second tour on Corregidor. As MacArthur’s liaison to the president of the Philippines, Manuel Quezon, Fellers accompanied the chief executive on his Atlantic crossing to the coronation of Britain’s King George VI. en, in mid-1940, while he was teaching English at the Point for the second time, the army selected him as an assistant military attaché
to Spain, possibly because he had learned Spanish in the Philippines. However, before he set out for Madrid, the War Department ordered him to Cairo as attaché in Egypt. For in September, from its colony of Libya, Italy had invaded Egypt, a former British protectorate.
