Great lives, fully lived, cast long shadows. Fifty years after his death, it’s not unusual to hear people rank Douglas MacArthur among America’s worst generals—alongside Benedict Arnold and William Westmoreland. His critics say he was insubordinate and arrogant, callous in dealing with dissent, his Korean War command studded with mistakes. “MacArthur could never see another sun, or even a moon for that matter, in the heavens, as long as he was the sun,” once said President Eisenhower, who had served under MacArthur in the Pacific. Some of what the critics say is undoubtedly true, but much of what they say is wrong. And all this noise seems to have drowned out the general’s tremendous accomplishments. What about his near flawless command during World War II, his trailblazing understanding of modern warfare, his grooming of some of the best commanders this country has ever seen? What about the fact that he is—as much as any other general in the war—responsible for the allied victory? It’s time to give “Dugout Doug” credit for these merits and not just cut him down for his mistakes—real and imagined. It’s time to reconsider Douglas MacArthur.
In a sense, MacArthur is the victim of his own success. If he had been content to receive the Japanese surrender on Sept. 2, 1945, and retire instead of continuing his career, he would be considered the greatest commander of World War II—and perhaps the greatest military commander in American history.
Instead, after serving as America’s “shogun” in Japan, where he laid the groundwork for Japan’s emergence as a democracy, he led U.S. forces in the Korean War. While MacArthur did author the assault that staved off an early defeat of U.S. forces on the peninsula, he consistently mishandled the Korea fight, underestimating China’s commitment to its North Korean ally and then purposely flouting Washington’s directives to limit the conflict. He fought bitterly over Korea policy with President Harry Truman and was relieved of his command.
MacArthur, who died 50 years ago last month, returned to the United States to great acclaim—he was, after all, one of the nation’s most decorated officers—but his fight with Truman overshadowed what he had accomplished in both of the world wars. He defended his actions in Korea in a series of public congressional hearings, but his testimony was self-referencing, uncertain and ultimately unconvincing. He dabbled in politics (without success) and, after failing to win the 1952 Republican nomination for president, moved with his second wife Jean and their son Arthur—Arthur MacArthur—to New York City, where the family lived in a set of suites at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Jean and her husband would be seen, from time to time, at the opera or taking in a baseball game. But for the most part, they spent their days out of the limelight. MacArthur, once so popular that mothers named their children for him, just faded away.
History has not treated him well. A recent, if informal, Internet poll listed him as America’s worst commander; Benedict Arnold, the Revolutionary War general who defected to the British and whose name is practically synonymous with the word “traitor,” was second. A popular nonfiction television series on the war has Marines on Peleliu, a small coral island where the Allies and the Japanese fought for more than two months over a single airstrip, cursing MacArthur for expending their lives needlessly. In fact, he had nothing to do with the battle.
Many Americans are convinced that MacArthur rehearsed his landing at Leyte, in the Philippines, where he dramatically waded onto the invasion beach through the Pacific’s rolling surf, reboarding his landing craft until the cameras got it just right. That would be Patton—on Sicily. A Pentagon hallway is dedicated to MacArthur, but a recently retired senior army officer who spent 30 years in uniform admitted that he found MacArthur embarrassing to his profession, because of his insubordination and his fight with Truman. “What about Cartwheel?” he was asked, in reference to MacArthur’s hugely successful operation against Japan. He had never heard of it. MacArthur’s detractors relay the story that his son Arthur renounced him and changed his name out of embarrassment. There’s not a shred of evidence to prove it.
History has forgotten all those things. But Douglas MacArthur is remembered, still, for his actions during the Bonus March, where he commanded troops that gassed and trampled World War I veterans peacefully protesting in Washington, D.C, during the Great Depression, and for his evacuation from Corregidor Island, in Manila Bay, which he had fled during the darkest days of the Pacific War. He was a man of enormous courage—yet the term “Dugout Doug,” referring to his time spent bottled up on Corregidor before the evacuation, has followed him through six decades.
But MacArthur’s legacy is so much richer than that.
Although he was vain, arrogant, ambitious and overly confident, these traits have been shared by so many of our nation’s military commanders that they seem almost a requirement for effective leadership. More crucially, a close study of World War II shows MacArthur to be the most innovative and brilliant commander of that conflict. His was the first approach to modern warfare that emphasized the need for rapid, light and highly mobile amphibious and air forces operating over vast distances.
The 11-month-long Operation Cartwheel, called “The Reduction of Rabaul” in the U.S. Army’s official history of the Pacific War, is MacArthur’s lasting memorial. Deftly moving his forces northward, from Australia into New Guinea, then swiftly westwards along its northern coast before vaulting them north again into the Admiralty Islands toward the Philippines, MacArthur cut off and then strangled Japan’s heavily garrisoned naval and air fortress at Rabaul in the New Britain Islands—the centerpiece of Japan’s defense in the southwest Pacific. The Reduction of Rabaul, with minimal American casualties, was a giant strategic success thanks to MacArthur. Without the crucial garrison, Japan could neither threaten Australia nor continue its South Pacific offensive.
Four decades before the U.S. Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act to dampen interservice rivalry and institutionalize “jointness”—whereby all service branches work together—MacArthur’s coordination of the Rabaul offensive was the most complex, best coordinated and most successful air, land and sea campaign in the history of warfare.
MacArthur regularly contended with the Navy and the Army Air Corps (what the Air Force was called then) for men and resources, but he understood that an American victory in the Southwest Pacific depended on Navy cruisers, destroyers and amphibious vehicles and on Air Corps fighters, bombers and transports. He never put his men ashore without seeking the views of amphibious commandeer Daniel Barbey, did so only when they were protected by Adm. Thomas Kinkaid’s ships and never fought a battle without the protection of Gen. George Kenney’s bombers. And while he and his naval counterpart, Ernie King, vied bitterly for control of the Pacific campaign, at the end of the war, MacArthur admitted that Army-Navy competition in the Pacific was a major obstacle to an earlier American victory.
MacArthur articulated his most famous dictum—“never get involved in a land war in Asia”—after the Japanese surrender, because he believed that Japan’s simultaneous war in China made his Philippines victory possible. Japan had annexed Manchuria in 1931, then invaded China in 1937, believing it would score a swift victory over the poorly supplied and poorly led Chinese Army. But Japan’s war in China became a quagmire, tying down millions of Japanese troops in endless and bloody battles—troops that could have been thrown against the Americans instead.
MacArthur’s actions in World War II aren’t unblemished. His inability to identify and promote open-minded and selfless staff officers (with some noted exceptions) remains his most disturbing military quality. His chief of staff, Richard Sutherland, was autocratic and, as Army Chief George Marshall noted, the “chief insulter” of the Navy. And MacArthur’s two most important intelligence officers were narrow-minded reactionaries whom he appointed to defend his reputation. “You don’t have a staff,” George Marshall once told MacArthur. “You have a court.” His command was a hotbed of paranoid anti-Roosevelt military operatives, a view that he fed by making derisive, if private, comments about the commander-in-chief.
Despite his poor judgment when it came to appointing his staff, MacArthur’s identification of combat commanders was faultless. Robert Eichelberger, George Kenney, Thomas Kinkaid and Walter Krueger—all four of whom MacArthur selected because of their prior service experience in Asia—were never defeated. Many of their subordinates, while relatively unknown, were among the best soldiers, sailors and airmen in U.S. history: Robert Beightler, Oscar Griswold, Ennis Whitehead and Joseph Swing, among many others. Daniel Barbey, who planned and implemented literally dozens of beach landings (“Dan, Dan the amphibious man” MacArthur’s troops called him), was unquestionably the best amphibious officer of the war. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, MacArthur’s ground commander when the Japanese invaded the Philippines, conducted a courageous defensive campaign in defense of the island of Luzon that remains a monument to what an outnumbered but well-led army can do.
There were others. Major (and, later, General) Hugh Casey was the best engineer in the Army and Richard Marshall, MacArthur’s head of logistics, was brilliant and hardworking. Casey’s battalions were responsible for building the docks and airfields for MacArthur’s ships and aircraft, while Marshall oversaw the supply of a military force that lay at the far end of America’s reach. MacArthur recognized the talents of these formidable men, and the Southwest Pacific campaign could not have been won without them.
Franklin Roosevelt’s complicated relationship with Douglas MacArthur defined the war in the Pacific. Roosevelt, who was wary of the general’s political ambitions, mistrusted MacArthur’s motives; MacArthur, an up-by-the-bootstraps conservative who viewed the New Yorker as a blue-blood elitist—mistrusted Roosevelt’s politics. The standard explanation, propounded by a surprising number of historians, would have us believe that Roosevelt removed MacArthur to the Philippines in the late 1930s to keep him out of the United States, only rescued him from the siege of Corregidor under political pressure brought by congressional Republicans, kept him undersupplied because he considered him a poor military leader and only agreed to his return to as the liberator of the Philippines for political reasons, fearing that criticism from MacArthur would undermine his chances for a fourth term.
None of this is true. Roosevelt never underestimated Douglas MacArthur, but he didn’t think he was a good politician; MacArthur never seriously threatened Roosevelt’s hold on office. Far from intending to exile a scheming general, the decision to appoint MacArthur commander in the Southwest Pacific came because Roosevelt anticipated a war with Japan. The president, having known MacArthur for two decades, also knew that the general was the highest ranking expert on Asia in the U.S. military, had traveled widely in the region and spent a lifetime studying it, could command large units in warfare (as he had done in World War I) and knew and understood the Japanese military.
MacArthur was removed to Australia from Corregidor not because that’s what the Republicans wanted, but because that’s what Australian Prime Minister John Curtin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and, most importantly, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted.
Roosevelt didn’t keep MacArthur’s forces undersupplied because he thought MacArthur a poor military leader, but because America had other, more pressing priorities—namely, supporting the Red Army in its brutal war on the Eastern Front and preparing for the invasions of North Africa and France. While MacArthur raged against this “Germany first” strategy, he understood it. So he went to war with what he had—and he did so brilliantly.
Certainly, Roosevelt benefited politically from MacArthur’s victories, but the president endorsed the commander’s return to Luzon because MacArthur convinced him that the United States owed the Philippine people their freedom. In this MacArthur was right. MacArthur’s anti-imperial views remain among his finest qualities. Roosevelt shared them.
Which is not to say that FDR trusted him. In 1932, after winning his party’s nomination for the presidency—and after MacArthur had unwisely tear-gassed the country’s Bonus March veterans—Roosevelt called MacArthur the most dangerous man in America. Mentioning him in the same breath as Louisiana politician and demagogue Huey Long, Roosevelt told one of his aides, “We must tame these fellows and make them useful to us.” When he became president, Roosevelt did tame MacArthur, by reappointing him as army chief of staff and recruiting him to organize the Civilian Conservation Corps, his signature New Deal domestic program.
Then, in 1941, the president saw he could make MacArthur useful. Roosevelt agreed with Marshall that MacArthur should lead the U.S. offensive against Japan from Australia. And although his subordinate commanders helped to make him victorious, it was MacArthur himself who authored their victories.
In the end, what MacArthur wrote of Genghis Khan could be written of him: “He crossed great rivers and mountain ranges, he reduced walled cities in his path and swept onward to destroy nations and pulverize whole civilizations. On the battlefield his troops maneuvered so swiftly and skillfully and struck with such devastating speed that times without number they defeated armies overwhelmingly superior to themselves.”
It’s time we give him credit for that.