Douglas MacArthur

General

• Born: January 26, 1880
• Birthplace: Little Rock, Arkansas
• Died: April 5, 1964
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

American military leader

MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers from 1945 through 1951, had a greater impact on American military history than virtually any other officer in the twentieth century. Variously gifted, he was a hero to much of the American public but a center of controversy on several occasions.

Areas of achievement Military affairs, warfare and conquest

Early Life

Douglas MacArthur, the son of Captain Arthur MacArthur and Mary Pinckney “Pinky” Hardy, was born at an Army post in Little Rock, Arkansas. MacArthur and his older brother (another had died early) led gangs of young Army brats, growing up in a succession of forts scattered throughout the United States as his father, a Civil War veteran of distinction, climbed to the highest ranks of the Army before running afoul of civilian authorities and ending his career in bitterness in 1909.

In 1899, Douglas MacArthur entered the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. Nearly six feet tall, he was slender as a plebe he weighed less than one hundred and forty pounds but gave the impression of Western ruggedness. Pushed to excel by his devoted mother, who resided in the West Point area during his four years there, MacArthur finished first in his class academically, rivaling the record compiled by Robert E. Lee more than half a century before. Also like Lee, MacArthur achieved the signal honor of being chosen cadet first captain in recognition of his leadership and military bearing.

However, MacArthur also exhibited some of the character traits that were to make his later years so controversial. One cadet found that it was impossible to be neutral about MacArthur. If one knew him at all well, another cadet concluded, one ended up either admiring him to the point of adulation or hating him. So extreme was MacArthur’s sense of honor that he threatened to resign over an interpretation of the rules in a mathematics class. He won the confrontation with his professor, a lieutenant colonel, but jeopardized his career in doing so.

Life’s Work

The Army in which MacArthur was commissioned as a second lieutenant in June, 1903, had outgrown its post-Civil War doldrums, but it was still a small force by European standards. Promotion was accordingly slow, and he did not gain the rank of captain until 1911. As an engineer officer, the branch to which the top-ranking graduates of West Point were usually assigned, he saw service in Wisconsin, Kansas, Michigan, Texas, Panama, and the Philippines. On detached duty, he accompanied his father on a lengthy tour of Asia in 1906, and in 1914 he undertook a risky intelligence mission in Mexico during the American occupation of Veracruz. Before and after his assignment in Mexico, MacArthur had staff duty in Washington and proved of great value in public relations. MacArthur, who could be as genial as he could be arrogant and supercilious, excelled in this role and also performed important work in setting up and selling to Congress and the public the selective service law when it was enacted after the United States entry into World War I. Unlike some career Army officers who disliked relying on the National Guard in wartime, MacArthur believed in it and in its public relations value and suggested that National Guard units from several states be combined into a division for duty in France. MacArthur, who requested a transfer to the infantry, was promoted to colonel and designated by the secretary of war to be chief of staff of this new division. MacArthur remained with the Forty-second “Rainbow” Division from its arrival in France in October, 1917, until the end of the war. He showed himself to have both the administrative talent required of a capable staff officer and an unusual flair for leadership. Although his duties did not require it, he paid frequent visits to the trenches and accompanied troops on several raids. His unconventional dress, highlighted by sweaters and scarves, also won for him much attention. Promoted to brigadier general in the summer of 1918, MacArthur received command of a brigade. Twice wounded in combat, he led his brigade throughout the Meuse-Argonne campaign, moving up to acting divisional commander shortly before the Armistice. For his exploits, he received a Distinguished Service Medal, two Purple Hearts, several other decorations from his own government, and many more from Allied nations, emerging from the war as one of the Army’s brightest young officers. The postwar demobilization, however, would cause many other officers of equal merit to wait years between promotions. Good luck and good timing enabled him to retain his brigadier’s rank, and, after service with the American contingent stationed in the Rhineland, he became superintendent of West Point in June, 1919. He went there at a time when West Point’s image had been tarnished by excessive hazing and an outdated curriculum. Although in politics he would be identified with conservative Republicans, MacArthur (as he proved over twenty-five years later when commander of the occupation of Japan) could also be a champion of progressive ideas, and he brought about some liberalization of cadet life and improvement in the curriculum. Between 1922 when he left West Point and 1930 when he became chief of staff, MacArthur served two tours of duty in the Philippines and was twice assigned corps commands in the United States. In 1922, he married Henrietta Louise Cromwell Brooks, a wealthy divorcée. They had no children and were divorced in 1929. He married Jean Marie Faircloth in 1937; they had one son. Promoted to major general in 1925, the youngest man to hold the rank at that time, MacArthur was named chief of staff by President Herbert Hoover in 1930. The position carried with it the rank of general. His five years in the post were difficult. The Depression made it difficult to accomplish much in the way of the modernization the Army required; his outspoken advocacy of preparedness at a time of financial austerity and antiwar sentiment earned for him much criticism, as did his linking of pacifism with communism as a threat to American security. His identification with the dispersal of the Bonus Army of unemployed veterans, who had come to Washington in 1932 to seek financial relief, also was controversial. Despite the understanding he frequently showed in public relations and his oft-demonstrated ability to use the media for his own advantage, in this case MacArthur misjudged the situation. He disregarded the advice of his assistant, Dwight D. Eisenhower, that he remain in the background and instead dressed in full uniform and, wearing his decorations, proceeded personally to lead the troops sent to evict the veterans from the old federal building they had been occupying. Ignoring the instructions sent from the secretary of war by messenger, MacArthur ordered the marchers to be forced back to their encampment, which went up in flames. Exactly who was responsible for setting the fires was not ascertained, but the affair proved to be a public relations disaster both for the Hoover administration and for MacArthur personally, and it helped attach an authoritarian image to him. MacArthur continued to serve as chief of staff during the first two years of the New Deal, making a genuine contribution to its domestic program. Instructed to do so, he effectively utilized Army personnel to organize the camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the New Deal’s most popular and productive agencies. At the request of the new Philippine Commonwealth government, MacArthur was named military adviser to the Philippines in 1935 with the duty of developing its armed forces. It was then anticipated that the Philippines would become an independent nation in 1944, at which time it would have to provide for its own security. MacArthur performed essentially the same role for about six years, first as adviser to the Philippine Commonwealth, then, from 1937 on, when he retired from the Army, as a field marshal in Philippine service. In the summer of 1941, with war between the United States and Japan becoming more and more likely, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recalled MacArthur to active service. Given the command of United States Army Forces Far East, he was quickly promoted to lieutenant general and led both the Filipino troops, whose training he had directed, and a small but slowly growing contingent of American forces. When war struck the Philippines in December, 1941, neither the training of Filipino forces nor the buildup of American troops had advanced far enough to avert disaster. MacArthur’s initial troop dispositions only compounded the difficulties defending the beachheads with inexperienced personnel, failing to move adequate supplies to the strategic Bataan Peninsula, where MacArthur soon ordered a delaying action, allowing his air power to be caught on the ground and largely destroyed even though he had ample warning of the strike on Pearl Harbor. Perhaps because of his command’s forward position, however, he ironically emerged from the debacle as a hero and was promoted to full general in late December. The gallant though doomed defense of Bataan and Corregidor increased MacArthur’s heroic stature, which his staff at headquarters was careful to enhance with laudatory press communiqués then and throughout the war. As the campaign on Bataan ground along, estrangement grew between MacArthur and his superiors in Washington, who were unable to send the reinforcements for which he kept pleading and which he kept promising his increasingly embittered troops. In March, 1942, MacArthur and his family left their Corregidor quarters under orders to proceed to Australia. In April, he was named commander of the Southwest Pacific Area, a newly formed theater of war. On his arrival in Australia, he had made the dramatic statement, “I shall return,” fostering the image of resolute leadership that would characterize his strategy throughout the war. Eventually, MacArthur’s forces did return to the Philippines, but first it was necessary to augment his troop strength, halt the Japanese advance in his theater in late 1942, and then begin the laborious process of advancing northward along the coast of New Guinea and nearby islands. Relying on a strategy of using the superior air and sea power that he had begun to achieve by mid-1943, MacArthur was able to bypass enemy strong points. In cooperation with Admiral William F. Halsey’s forces operating in the Solomon Islands, troops under MacArthur and his able air, naval, and ground commanders moved throughout 1943 from the Papuan region of New Guinea to Salamaua, Lae, and Finschhafen in the Huon Gulf area. In 1944, his forces advanced more than one thousand miles, into and beyond Hollandia in New Guinea to Morotai in the Molucca Islands. In doing so, his ground forces suffered fewer than two thousand combat casualties. While operations were still being conducted by other troops on Leyte, in the central Philippines, which had been invaded in October, 1944, General Walter Krueger’s Sixth Army landed at Lingayen Gulf on Luzon in January, 1945, initiating the largest American ground campaign of the entire war in the Pacific. With the campaign on this strategic northern island progressing satisfactorily, units from the Eighth Army made numerous amphibious landings to liberate islands in the central and southern Philippines. Many of these operations were conducted without explicit approval from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, continuing MacArthur’s long-standing habit of ignoring instructions he did not like and undertaking campaigns in advance of firm directives. By the spring of 1945, American forces were converging on Japan itself, and the division of the Pacific into Southwest Pacific and Pacific Ocean areas had become meaningless. Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, previously the commander of the Pacific Ocean area, would henceforth command all United States naval forces. As the newly appointed head of all U.S. Army forces in the Pacific, MacArthur, who now held the five-star rank of general of the Army, would have overall command of the ground phases of Operations Olympic and Coronet, the planned invasions of the Japanese home islands of Kyūshū and Honshū scheduled to take place in November, 1945, and early 1946, respectively. The announcement of Japan’s surrender in August, 1945, following the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, abrogated these plans, and President Harry S. Truman designated MacArthur Supreme Commander, Allied Powers (SCAP). As such he conducted the surrender ceremonies on board the battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945, and commanded the Allied occupation of Japan itself. MacArthur’s years as SCAP have often been regarded as his finest and most enduring accomplishment. The Japanese armed forces were demobilized with little difficulty. Democratic advances were made in land ownership, education, labor relations, and the structure of government, and antitrust legislation directed against the prewar holding companies, the zaibatsu (financial clique), was promulgated. The actual story was more complicated, for some of the reforms were more cosmetic than real and many could not be credited solely to MacArthur but to a complex interplay between Japanese elites and various American authorities. MacArthur’s most conspicuous failure was what his most informed biographer has termed his “quixotic” attempt to promote evangelical Christianity in Japan: The people simply did not want it. Some of MacArthur’s actions were undoubtedly carried out with his own presidential ambitions in mind he would gladly have accepted the Republican nomination in 1944, 1948, or 1952, had it been forthcoming but for whatever motives, MacArthur’s tenure as SCAP was in general a success. In his final years, he seems to have recognized that it was his most lasting contribution to world peace. The war that broke out in divided Korea in June, 1950, brought MacArthur new military laurels followed by an abrupt end to his long career. After initial retreats, the forces under MacArthur’s command recovered following the Inchon landings that reprised the best of his World War II operations for audacity and success, and by October, victory seemed at hand. Tensions instead mounted between the general and President Truman following the Communist Chinese entry into a war that settled down into one of attrition. In April, 1951, MacArthur was relieved of all of his military responsibilities following the publication of a letter the general had sent to an influential Republican politician making clear his disagreement with the president’s policies of limiting the warfare in Korea until a negotiated peace could be had. In a way, the very success of Inchon could be blamed for his unceremonious relief, for it made the aging general more certain than ever of the correctness of his own judgments and by the same token made it more difficult for President Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to question his recommendations and to make clear that he was insubordinate when he issued policy statements, as he clearly had in a letter to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August, 1950. Within a week after his dismissal, MacArthur was being greeted as a hero in the several stops he made en route to Washington, D.C., where he spoke to a joint session of Congress. His remarks critical of Truman’s policies were applauded, but in the Senate hearings held about his dismissal, the enthusiasm of many for MacArthur’s views on the Korean conflict cooled. MacArthur still had political aspirations and gave the keynote address at the 1952 Republican National Convention. It was a poor speech and helped neither the cause of Senator Robert A. Taft, whom MacArthur supported, nor his own chances for a draft should Taft falter and the convention delegates look elsewhere for a nominee. Eisenhower received the nomination. MacArthur lived twelve more years, residing in New York City, discharging his nominal duties as chair of the board of Remington Rand and making only infrequent public appearances, one of them a visit to the Philippines in 1961. He died at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington on April 5, 1964, only a few months after he had completed writing his memoirs.

Significance

MacArthur served in the U.S. Army for almost fifty years, achieving his country’s highest honors. He led his forces to memorable victories after appalling defeat, only to have his career end amid controversy. Throughout, he was an actor almost as much as a soldier, a characteristic that was recognized by many who observed him closely. His use of distinctive attire, his often brilliant if theatrical speeches, his seeking of the headlines, all added to the aura of a larger-than-life personality. Was it because of his flamboyance that he never achieved the presidency, a position he would have liked but preferred not to seek openly? Unlike Eisenhower, whose unassuming mannerisms made him the perfect citizen-soldier, MacArthur always seemed too removed from the people of the United States to become their president. Perhaps he was indeed, as one of his biographers has put it, the “American Caesar.”

Further Reading

Harvey, Robert. American Shogun: General MacArthur, Emperor Hirohito, and the Drama of Modern Japan. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2006. Describes how American-Japanese relations were shaped by MacArthur and Hirohito both during and after World War II.

James, D. Clayton. The Years of MacArthur. 3 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970-1985. Magnificent study of MacArthur. Critical of the general’s weaknesses but also shrewd in appreciating and evaluating his many strengths. Not likely to be surpassed as the definitive work.

Kenney, George C. General Kenney Reports: A Personal History of the Pacific War. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949. An example of a memoir written by one of the able field commanders who joined MacArthur in Australia. Kenney built and led a superb air arm for MacArthur to use on the road back.

Leary, William M., ed. MacArthur and the American Century: A Reader. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Collection of essays about MacArthur’s life and career written by MacArthur and others, including Dwight D. Eisenhower and D. Clayton James.

MacArthur, Douglas. Reminiscences. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. A memoir that is a fine example of selective memory in writing. Better for MacArthur’s perception of himself than as historical record.

Manchester, William. American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Not very well received as history, certainly not in a class with James’s study, but readable and a good one-volume biography.

Petillo, Carole M. Douglas MacArthur: The Philippine Years. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. Reveals one of the more questionable episodes in MacArthur’s life, his acceptance of a large cash payment from the Philippine Commonwealth early in 1942. The author speculates: Was it a bribe to ensure that MacArthur would see that Philippine leaders were evacuated to safety, or was it in the Filipino tradition of gift giving? Mainly concerned with establishing the psychological impact on MacArthur of the many years he spent in the Philippines at various intervals in his career, this work belongs to the genre of psychobiography, the controversial but sometimes rewarding use of psychoanalytic theory in the writing of biography.

Schaller, Michael. The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. A study of American occupation policy in Japan, revisionist in nature and laudable in its effort to place the occupation in the context of the Cold War.

Smith, Robert Ross. Triumph in the Philippines. Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1963. One of several detailed books in the official series The United States Army in World War II that together provide a comprehensive view of MacArthur’s campaigns from Bataan to the triumphant return to Luzon. Indispensable on the subject of MacArthur’s campaigns. A similar series is available for the Korean conflict.

Weintraub, Stanley. MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero. New York: Free Press, 2000. Chronicles MacArthur’s key actions during the Korean War. Weintraub maintains that MacArthur’s character and methods led him to make serious errors of judgment.