Douglas MacArthur: I shall return

Few American commanders were as brilliant, as theatrical, or as controversial as Douglas MacArthur. Driven from the Philippines early in World War II, he vowed to return, fought his way back across the Pacific, and kept his word. He went on to rebuild occupied Japan and to command in Korea, where his greatest triumph was followed by the clash with his president that ended his career. To many he seemed imperious, aloof and vain; to those who served closest to him he was warm and courageous. Most agree on his intelligence, his gift for command and his devotion to duty.²

A soldier's son

MacArthur was born on 26 January 1880 in Little Rock, Arkansas, the youngest of three sons of Arthur MacArthur, a Union hero of the Civil War who won the Medal of Honor and later became the army's senior officer and military governor of the Philippines. His mother, Mary "Pinky" Hardy, came from a Norfolk, Virginia, family whose sons had fought for the Confederacy. She was ambitious for him and told him he must grow up to be a great man, like his father and Robert E. Lee.³

He entered West Point in 1899 and graduated in 1903 first in his class, with one of the best academic records in the academy's history. Commissioned in the Corps of Engineers, he went first to the Philippines, toured Asia with his father in 1905 and 1906, served as an aide in Theodore Roosevelt's White House, and in 1914 went on a daring reconnaissance at Veracruz, Mexico. He was recommended for the Medal of Honor for it, but the award was refused.⁴

The Rainbow Division

When the United States entered World War I, MacArthur helped create the 42nd Division from National Guard units of 26 states, and named it the "Rainbow" because it stretched across the country like a rainbow. He went to France as its chief of staff in 1917 and served as chief of staff, brigade commander and finally division commander. He went over the top without a gas mask or helmet, in a long scarf and his West Point sweater, and came home a brigadier general with two Distinguished Service Crosses, a Distinguished Service Medal and seven Silver Stars, one of the most decorated American officers of the war.⁵

Chief of Staff and the Bonus Army

Between the wars he rose fast. As superintendent of West Point after the war he pushed through far-reaching reforms against strong resistance; he served two more tours in the Philippines and headed the American Olympic Committee in 1928. In 1930 President Hoover made him Army Chief of Staff with the rank of general, and he spent five years trying to keep a starved army alive through the Depression.⁶

In the summer of 1932 he accompanied the troops sent to drive the Bonus Army, World War veterans demanding early payment of a promised bonus, out of their camps in Washington. Soldiers with tanks and tear gas drove the veterans from their shanties along the Anacostia and destroyed the camps. MacArthur believed the marchers were led by Communists; most were simply desperate men. The episode was a blow to Hoover and stained MacArthur's name for years.⁷

In 1935 he went back to Manila as military adviser to the Philippine Commonwealth, later with the title of field marshal, trying to build a Filipino army with too little money. He retired from the US Army in 1937, the year he married Jean Faircloth; their son Arthur was born in Manila in 1938.⁸

The fall of the Philippines

As war with Japan approached, Roosevelt recalled MacArthur to active duty in July 1941 and put him in command of US forces in the Far East. Hours after Pearl Harbor the Japanese struck the Philippines, and MacArthur's plan to fight on the beaches collapsed. He fell back to the Bataan Peninsula and the island fortress of Corregidor, but the food he had scattered to supply the beach defenses could not be brought in, and about 80,000 soldiers and 20,000 civilians crowded into Bataan. The army faced a food crisis from the start.⁹ › Battle of Bataan, 1942

Under Roosevelt's orders, MacArthur left Corregidor by PT boat on the night of 11 March 1942 with his wife and son, and reached Australia to command Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific. Arriving, he promised to return; the words were "I shall return." Bataan fell in April, the largest surrender of an American army in history, and on 6 May General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered Corregidor. For the defense of the Philippines MacArthur received the Medal of Honor, the award his father had won in the Civil War.¹⁰

I shall return

The way back was long. MacArthur's first offensive drove the Japanese out of Papua by January 1943. Through 1943 and 1944 his forces leapfrogged along the coast of New Guinea from Lae to Sansapor and took the Admiralties and western New Britain, bypassing strongpoints rather than storming them, while forces in the Solomons under his strategic control isolated the great base at Rabaul. He fought for most of this time with too few men and ships, and he resented the decisions that put Europe ahead of the Pacific and the Navy's Central Pacific drive ahead of his own.¹¹

He won the argument to invade the Philippines rather than Formosa. On 20 October 1944 he waded ashore on Leyte and kept his promise. In December he was promoted to General of the Army, one of only five men to hold the rank. His largest and costliest campaign, on Luzon, lasted seven months in 1945.¹² › Battle of Leyte Gulf, 1944

Surrender and occupation

On 2 September 1945 MacArthur presided over Japan's formal surrender aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. He had held the ceremony back so that the Allies and the formerly occupied nations could take part, and he made it a solemn ceremony of peace rather than a display of triumph.¹³

As Allied commander of the occupation from 1945 to 1951, he governed Japan with wide and sometimes autocratic powers. His headquarters demobilized the armed forces, purged militarists, restored the economy and pressed for a new liberal constitution that renounced war and gave women the vote, with reforms in land ownership, education, labor and public health. He resisted pressure to put Emperor Hirohito on trial, using the throne to steady the occupation, and when hunger threatened in the first year he had food shipped in. Many Japanese came to admire him.¹⁴

Inchon

When North Korea invaded the South on 25 June 1950, MacArthur, now 70, took command of the United Nations forces. By August the Americans and South Koreans had been pushed into the Pusan Perimeter. On 12 August MacArthur ordered his staff to prepare a landing at Inchon, the port of Seoul, with only a month to plan an operation that usually took five or six. The Joint Chiefs doubted it: the tides rose and fell about ten meters, the beaches were usable only six hours a day, and the approach ran through a narrow channel guarded by Wolmi Island. MacArthur argued that the North Koreans had thrown almost everything at Pusan and that nowhere else were their supply lines so exposed.¹⁵

On 15 September the Marines took Wolmi Island and then landed along Inchon's waterfront. Seoul fell on 26 September, the day the Eighth Army breaking out of Pusan linked up with the landing force, and the North Korean army ceased to exist as a cohesive force; more than 125,000 prisoners were taken. Britannica still counts the landing among the greatest operations in military history.¹⁶ › The Battle of Inchon, 1950

The Chinese, Truman and the end

Authorized to cross the 38th parallel, MacArthur drove north with his forces divided, discounting warnings that China would intervene. In October he met Truman on Wake Island, a frosty encounter. In late November massive Chinese armies fell on the UN forces and drove them back below Seoul. MacArthur now pressed publicly for a wider war against China.¹⁷

In early 1951 he criticized American policy in interviews and statements, and a letter he wrote to the House Republican leader, Joseph Martin, attacking Truman's handling of the war was read on the floor of the House. For Truman it was the final straw. At 1 a.m. on 11 April 1951 the White House announced that MacArthur was relieved of all his commands for failing to give "his wholehearted support" to government policy.¹⁸

Old soldiers

MacArthur came home after 14 years abroad to a hero's welcome and calls for Truman's impeachment. On 19 April 1951 he addressed a joint session of Congress and closed with a line from an old barracks ballad: "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away." But days of Senate hearings, and his calls to widen the war and bomb China, cooled the enthusiasm, and a boom for his nomination for president in 1952 fizzled.¹⁹

He spent his last years in New York as chairman of Remington Rand, wrote his memoirs and gave his "Duty, Honor, Country" speech at West Point. He died at Walter Reed Army Hospital on 5 April 1964, aged 84, and was buried at the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, on 11 April, 13 years to the day after his dismissal. He remains one of America's most celebrated and most debated commanders: the hero of Leyte and Inchon, and the general whose conflict with a president became a lasting lesson in civilian control of the military.²⁰

See the Pacific clash at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the siege of Corregidor, the general who succeeded him, Matthew Ridgway, the World War II era, or meet his peers in the greatest American commanders. He was born on 26 January.