MacArthur, Douglas

MacArthur, Douglas (b. 26 Jan. 1880, d. 5 Apr. 1964). US general Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, he was commissioned into the US army at the Military Academy in West Point in 1903. He served first in Tokyo and in Mexico, distinguishing himself as a divisional commander in France in World War I. By 1930 he had reached the rank of general, and became Chief of Staff of the US Army until 1935. Sent to the Philippines to build up a Filipino defence force, he stayed on there until 1941, even after retiring in 1937. He was then recalled by President F. D. Roosevelt to lead the defence against the Japanese attack. After leaving the Philippines to the Japanese in early 1942, in March 1942 he became Commander of Allied Forces in the South-West Pacific to lead the subsequent Allied counterattack in the Pacific. In pursuit of this goal he developed the strategy of ‘island hopping’ through which he bypassed heavily fortified Japanese-occupied islands to take control of the less well-defended ones. As commander of all US army forces in the Pacific, he received the Japanese surrender on board the USS Missouri on 2 September 1945.

As commander of the SCAP (Supreme Command of the Allied Powers) he was the effective governor of occupied Japan, taking an active role in many reforms, including the drafting of the new Japanese constitution. As Commander of UN troops in the Korean War, he oversaw a dramatically successful landing at Inchon in September 1950 and pushed North Korean troops back to the Chinese border. He was forced to retreat when the Chinese entered the war. In 1951 he resumed the offensive, but tension arose between him and President Truman, who feared his demagogic popularity and also feared that MacArthur was prepared to risk a full-scale atomic war. In a public and humiliating rebuke, he was dismissed in 1951. He failed to obtain the Republican nomination for the presidential election of 1952, which was won by his fellow general, Dwight Eisenhower.