Douglas MacArthur

Born January 26, 1880
Little Rock, Arkansas
Died April 5, 1964
Washington, D.C.

American military leader

Most people who came into contact with General Douglas MacArthur during his long career as a military commander were taken aback by the power of his personality. He was described as "larger than life" by many, with a remarkable gift for making compelling speeches and bringing drama and high passion to battlefields and military command offices world wide. His military accomplishments from World War I (1914–18) and II (1939–45) and on through the Korean War (1950–53) were numerous and significant, and his courage in the face of grave danger became a matter of legend. With his corncob pipe and sunglasses and his well-kept uniforms, he cut a very impressive figure, and the press kept busy photographing him walking fearlessly in the face of flying bullets. Yet, despite his near perfect American hero image, MacArthur became the most controversial military figure of the Korean War and was relieved of his command. Some of his admirers remember him as a strong and appealing military hero, while others remember him for his arrogance and disdain for the chain of command.

A general's son

Douglas MacArthur was born on January 26, 1880, in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was the son of a very distinguished military leader, Arthur MacArthur, who had won the Congres sional Medal of Honor during the Civil War (1860–65). In 1898, as a brigadier general, Arthur MacArthur led troops as they shattered Filipino resistance to the American takeover of the Philippines. He then became military governor of the Philippines. By the time he retired in 1909, Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur had become commander of the U.S. forces in the Pacific.

Military background

Douglas MacArthur was the third son in his family. His brother, Arthur II, was a navy captain whose career was marked by outstanding service in the Spanish-American War (1898) and World War I. His paternal grandfather was a lieutenant governor (and briefly governor) of Wisconsin and a federal judge. MacArthur often attributed his inspiration and success to his family heritage.

Douglas took an early liking to the military. He was born at a military station, and for much of his early life his family moved from post to post. He spent three early years, from age four to six, at Fort Selden near the Mexican border, watching the drills and parades of the fifty soldiers stationed there. He remembered learning to ride and shoot at Fort Selden even before he could read or write.

Probably the strongest influence on the young MacArthur was his mother, Mary Pinkney ("Pinkie") Hardy, the ambitious, strong-willed daughter of an aristocratic family from Norfolk, Virginia. Pinkie MacArthur spent much of her time persuading her son Douglas that he was special and destined for greatness. A very dominating parent, she nagged and pushed him to do great things, and also pushed the people around him to appreciate him. As a result, Douglas was, from an early age, a leader and an achiever. He earned high grades and found time to be active in sports but never participated much in the social activities at school. An acquaintance later said he was arrogant, or overly proud, from the age of eight.

The illustrious military career begins

In 1899, at the age of nineteen, MacArthur entered the military academy at West Point. His mother rented a room at a hotel overlooking her son's room at the academy. She is said to have watched over him very closely, making sure that he worked hard. He did. He earned top grades while playing baseball and managing the football team. In his senior year, he also served as president of the student body of West Point. MacArthur graduated in 1903 with a grade average of 98.14 percent, first in his class. He held the third best academic record in the history of the academy. On top of this, he clearly had an active social life, for he is said to have been engaged to eight women at the same time while still in school.

MacArthur rose rapidly in the service. His first assignment was in Leyte in the Philippines as an aide to his father. In 1906 and 1907, he attended the Engineer School of Application in Washington, D.C., receiving a degree in 1908, and he worked in the Office of the Chief of Engineers. By 1911, he had risen to the rank of captain. In 1913, after serving as an aide to President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), MacArthur found himself in Vera Cruz, Mexico, with the Corps of Engineers. The next year, he was promoted to the rank of major, at first supervising the State Department Building in Washington and then joining the general staff of the army. He was on the general staff in 1917 when the United States entered World War I.

World War I

Still only a major, MacArthur was lower in rank than most of the army staff. Yet he now began to show the arrogance and determination that would mark his military career. The wartime army needed more men to fight in Europe. To remedy this, MacArthur was strongly in favor of enlisting the National Guard into the regular army, but most generals on the staff were against it, believing that the part-time volunteer guard was not properly prepared. MacArthur argued so violently on the issue that one superior officer threatened to block any more promotions for him. Eventually, though, President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) came to hear of the young officer's proposal of forming a single battalion from National Guard volunteers of every state, a Rainbow Battalion. Wilson liked the idea, and soon MacArthur found himself a colonel helping to form the Rainbow Battalion and then a brigadier general leading the battalion into battle.

Even as a general, MacArthur was defiant of army ways, particularly in regard to his dress. Once he climbed out of the trenches in France to lead his men into combat wearing a West Point letter sweater with no helmet or gas-mask, armed only with a riding crop. He continually exposed himself to enemy fire. Winning many medals for his bravery and leadership, MacArthur was wounded twice and disabled by a gas attack once during World War I.

Postwar duty

After the war, MacArthur was appointed superintendent of West Point. He was the youngest commandant of the academy ever to serve. He stayed in that position for three years until, in 1923, he followed in his father's footsteps on assignment to the Philippines. Back in the United States a year later, he took command posts of several army corps before returning to the island nation in 1928. He had married Henrietta Louise Cromwell Brooks, a wealthy divorcee, on February 14, 1922; they had no children. Seven years later they were divorced.

President Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) appointed MacArthur army chief of staff in November 1930, with the temporary rank of general. Because of the worsening Great Depression (a worldwide economic downturn prompted by the U.S. stock market crash of 1929 that lasted throughout the 1930s), much of his time and energy went toward preserving the army's already meager manpower and equipment. MacArthur served the army well as its directing officer. His work was so impressive that President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) asked him to stay in the position until 1935—one year beyond the normal tour for a chief of staff. From 1935 to 1937, MacArthur headed the U.S. military mission to the Philippine Commonwealth, given the task of developing Philippine self-defense in preparation for independence in 1946.

Field marshall

In 1935, MacArthur suffered a very difficult loss when his mother died. Two years later, in 1937, he wed Jean Marie Faircloth. This second marriage endured and the couple had one son, Arthur MacArthur III. Also in 1937, MacArthur retired from the U.S. Army. His old friend Manuel Quezon (1878–1944), then president of the Philippines, had asked him to serve as a military adviser. He became a field marshall in the Philippine army, with an assistant appointed by the U.S. Army, a young major named Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969; see entry). (The United States at this point in Philippine history was in charge of the island nation's defense and so could make such appointments.)

Pacific commander

When it appeared that the United States would soon be involved in World War II, MacArthur was recalled to serve in the U.S. Army. In 1941, President Roosevelt appointed him a major general, and one day later promoted him to lieutenant general in charge of the U.S. forces in the Pacific.

For some reason, MacArthur felt that the Philippines were not threatened by the war. He told John Hersey of Time magazine in May 1941 that "if Japan entered the war, the Americans, the British and the Dutch could handle her with about half the forces they now have deployed in the Far East." He held to this idea even after, on December 7, 1941, Japanese airplanes struck Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Ten hours later, the Japanese struck Clark Field in the Philippines, destroying most of MacArthur's planes.

A Japanese invasion and takeover of the Philippines followed, with forces far beyond the numbers the U.S. leaders thought possible. Once the fighting on the island began, MacArthur spread his poorly equipped forces far too thin and greatly exaggerated Japanese strength. MacArthur and his troops were penned up in the jungles with little possibility of escape or reinforcement. Still, MacArthur took personal command of his army's defenses, and to his credit he saved the city of Luzon from immediate destruction. He concentrated his forces on the Bataan peninsula and established his headquarters on the island of Corregidor. By moving food supplies away from the troops at Bataan and over to Corregidor, he created hardships for the soldiers. At this time, too, he accepted a personal gift of $500,000 from Philippines president Quezon, which violated army rules. Although MacArthur was known throughout his career for exposing himself, sometimes recklessly, to enemy fire, he did not visit the exhausted troops at Bataan even once.

It became clear that the U.S. forces in Bataan faced defeat, but MacArthur refused to leave the desperate situation until he was commanded to do so by President Roosevelt. In March 1942, he left the Philippines for Australia, taking with him a few of his men who could not become Japanese prisoners because they knew key military secrets. Typically, MacArthur revised his last message to the Japanese and Filipinos. In the message, he used the words "I shall return" instead of the army's recommendation, "We shall return."

In early April, the Filipino and American troops on Bataan surrendered; a month later Corregidor fell to the Japanese. Meanwhile, MacArthur was awarded the Medal of Honor, and to most of the public in the United States he emerged as the first American hero of the war.

A hero again in the Southwest Pacific

In mid-April 1942, MacArthur took command of the Southwest Pacific Area, a newly formed theater in which the principal forces for many months would be Australian. In the Papuan (New Guinea) campaign of July 1942 through January 1943, MacArthur's forces stopped a Japanese thrust and then counterattacked, annihilating the enemy army in several battles. The Papuan victory, though, was very costly, with nearly nine thousand combat casualties (and even more felled by diseases) out of thirty-three thousand troops engaged.

After Papua, MacArthur was determined to avoid frontal assaults and to bypass enemy strongholds. From this victory, he went on to a series of brilliant amphibious (land, water, and air) assaults throughout the Southwest Pacific, securing important harbors and air and land bases. His ground actions spanned fourteen hundred miles: his forces suffered some sixteen hundred combat casualties while killing more than twenty-six thousand enemy troops. A master of publicity, MacArthur obtained great press coverage. His popularity was rapidly increasing in the United States, and in 1944 he threw in his name as a presidential candidate in the primaries. The bid was unsuccessful and was quickly dropped.

Return to Bataan

On September 20, 1944, the chiefs of staff of the branches of the U.S. military (who advise the president and the secretary of defense on matters of war) ordered MacArthur back to the Philippines to attack Leyte, and on October 3 to invade the northern island of Luzon. MacArthur's orders limited him to Luzon, but he wanted to conquer the entire Philippines. Acting contrary to instructions from Washington, he foolishly divided his forces by sending the equivalent of five divisions to conquer one island after another in head-on strikes. The Japanese then engaged his troops in guerilla action, with ambushes and surprise attacks from mountain hideaways, and the campaign became one of the bloodiest operations of the Pacific. But MacArthur won back Bataan.

Adviser to Japan

The dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan ended the war, calling for major decisions by the Allies (the United States, the British Commonwealth, the Soviet Union, and other European nations) as to what should be done about the government of Japan. As commander of the U.S. forces and of the Allied forces in the Pacific, MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender. He was then charged with building a new government in Japan.

The Japanese government had been based on a belief in an emperor chosen by heaven and a government dominated by the military. MacArthur, as usual, was prepared. He had planned to turn Japan into a democracy. His arrogant ways in this instance proving useful, he marched into the Japanese capital of Tokyo with a handful of aides, all without weapons, and established his office there. The emperor was allowed to continue as the symbol of unity for the Japanese but without any power to govern. MacArthur directed the emperor and his officials in a change toward elected government.

For five years, MacArthur held several positions: commander of the U.S. forces in the Pacific, commander of the Allied and then the United Nations forces, and military commander of Japan. He worked seven days a week long into the night to form a Japanese constitution and a form of government much like that of the United States. Although MacArthur was one of the most conservative figures in American public life, during his administration of Japan many reforms were put into place, in such diverse areas as women's rights, trade unions, education and police systems, and land redistribution. MacArthur was particularly proud of his hand in the drafting of the Japanese constitution of 1947. Provisions included universal adult suffrage (the right to vote), a bill of rights, a clause outlawing discrimination, and the renunciation of war.

In fact, MacArthur's job in Japan was to carry out the policies dictated by the heads of the branches of the U.S. military, who served as advisors to the president and secretary of defense in matters of war, and a council of the Allied powers. But by most accounts, he ruled as if he were a prince. MacArthur's personality and distinctive style of leadership so dominated his headquarters that the Japanese people generally came to view the occupation as personified in his image. To some, he seemed to provide strong, inspiring leadership at a time when they had despaired of their old leaders, who had brought the country to ruin. His imperious and dignified manner, dramatic flair, dedication to his mission, and empathy for the war-ravaged nation were esteemed by many Japanese, particularly during the early phase of the occupation (1945–47).

The Korean War

After 1946, MacArthur was also head of the Far East Command, which consisted of all American ground, air, and sea forces in Japan, the Ryukyus, Korea (to 1948), the Philippines, the Marianas, and the Bonins. Trouble had been brewing in Korea—the country had come to be divided between the communist North (supported by the Soviet Union) and the nationalist South (allied with the United States) after World War II, and both sides sought to reunify the country with its own government ruling—but MacArthur was not prepared for what was to come. By 1950, the new nation of North Korea had built an army of 135,000 soldiers, trained by Soviet advisers. The force was well armed, with 120 tanks supplied by the Soviets along with 40 fighter aircraft and 70 bombers. Battles had been going on at the border for over a year, some of them resulting in hundreds of casualties, and many started by the South Koreans. But on June 25, neither the South Koreans nor the Americans were aware that the North Koreans were gathering their forces along the border. North Korea had 90,000 soldiers prepared to attack across the border. They faced 10,000 unprepared South Korean troops. The attack was so sudden and so unsuspected that within a few days the capital city of Seoul collapsed.

At first, from his headquarters in Japan MacArthur believed that the South Koreans were strong enough to repel

the invasion. When Seoul fell, however, he called the media and told them to prepare for a very dangerous trip to Korea. He was photographed at the battlefront, undaunted by the bullets flying everywhere. On the flight back to Hawaii, he told a reporter that with two U.S. divisions, he could stop the communist forces. Within a couple of days, President Harry S. Truman (1884–1972; see entry) authorized two U.S. divisions to go to Korea at once. Soon after, the United Nations agreed to enter the conflict. But stopping the North Koreans proved much more difficult than anyone imagined. As the U.S. troops went in and took up positions with the South Korean army in an attempt to delay the North Koreans' south ward advances, they were shattered over and over again, incurring heavy losses. By late August 1950, they had taken up a defensive position at the southern end of the Korean peninsula, called the Pusan Perimeter. By September even this line was being threatened.

MacArthur defends South Korea

MacArthur had been caught unprepared, but he now planned a counterattack. Inchon was a port city near Seoul in the area captured by the communists. Rather than fight back from the base at Pusan, MacArthur led a landing at Inchon, cutting off the North Korean army from its supplies in the north. So effective was MacArthur's plan that the North Korean forces were soon in retreat. Supported by a United Nations General Assembly resolution calling for the reunification of Korea, MacArthur sent the UN forces in an advance toward the Yalu River at the northern border of North Korea. On October 15, he and Truman conferred at Wake Island, mainly about plans for the postwar rehabilitation of Korea, so near did victory seem.

Two weeks later, however, UN troops near the Yalu were severely attacked by Communist Chinese forces. Then, mysteriously, the Chinese withdrew and disappeared after ten days of combat. MacArthur chose to ignore their warning and launched his "end-the-war" offensive at the end of November. Much to the concern of many military leaders, MacArthur divided his army in two, weakening it. Although his orders were to send only South Korean troops to fight near the border with China (to avoid an American conflict with China, which would certainly lead to expanded warfare), MacArthur ordered U.S. troops to advance to the Yalu. Within two days, a massive Chinese offensive routed his forces in the worst defeat ever suffered by an American army.

By January 1951, General Matthew B. Ridgway (1895–1993), had halted the communist advance. MacArthur was soon complaining that the U.S. government had tied his hands. On March 7, he accused the Truman administration of preventing him from directly bombing China's war-making potential. A week later, he called for the unification of Korea, a goal abandoned by the Truman administration. On March 24, knowing that Truman was in the process of trying to start peace talks with the communists, MacArthur called upon the Chinese commander in chief to negotiate directly with him or face U.S. strikes on mainland China. On April 5, House Minority leader Joseph E. Martin released a letter MacArthur had written about the usefulness of enlisting Nationalist Chinese troops supplied by Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) against the

Chinese Communists. (Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong [Mao Tse-tung; 1893–1976; see entries] had driven the American-backed Chinese Nationalist forces, led by Chiang, to the island of Taiwan [formerly Formosa] in October 1949 following a bloody civil war.) Engaging the Chinese Nationalists had long since been considered and vetoed by the Truman administration; MacArthur's letter could only be read as a weapon against the U.S. president and his administration.

Fired

MacArthur had more than once taken action without the approval of his superiors or of the president. Now he was publicly speaking out against the president's actions. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (the president's military advisors) and the Departments of State and Defense met to consider whether he could be trusted to carry out the orders he received. The majority felt that he could not. Truman listened to all of his advisers and then stated his decision. On April 11, 1951, the president fired his most famous and popular general, replacing him with General Ridgway.

MacArthur had served in the military for fifty-two years. He had won nearly every medal for valor and courage awarded by the United States. He had been the highest-ranking officer in the military forces of another nation and had earned great respect for the defense of the Philippines and the peace in Japan. He served his nation so continuously that he had been out of the United States for sixteen years. When the news was brought to him, his only response was to his wife, "Jeanie, we're going home at last," as quoted in Joseph C. Goulden's Korea: The Untold Story of the War.

A career change

MacArthur returned to Washington, D.C. Though he arrived after midnight, twenty thousand admirers were on hand to welcome him. He was invited to speak to Congress, where he denied that he had acted in opposition to the president's directives. He became a popular speaker throughout the country. Public clamor against Truman's action subsided during the Senate hearings in May and June on the general's dismissal, especially after the Joint Chiefs testified that MacArthur's proposals for winning the war had been strategically unsound and might have resulted in a greatly expanded conflict.

In 1944, 1948, and 1952, conservative Republican factions tried to have MacArthur chosen as the party's presidential candidate, but these plans never went very far. After failing to get the nomination in 1952, MacArthur became the chairman of the board of Remington Rand (later Sperry-Rand). One of his final visitors was President Lyndon B. Johnson. MacArthur advised Johnson, as he had John F. Kennedy, not to send ground forces to Vietnam or anywhere else in mainland Asia.

MacArthur died in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 1964, at the age of eighty-four. For his funeral, in keeping with his own request, his body was dressed in one of his old tropical uniforms decorated with only the U.S. and five-star general insignias. He once said that if history a hundred years in the future remembered him only briefly for contributing to the advance of peace, he would gladly yield every honor which has been accorded by war.

Where to Learn More

Darby, Jean. Douglas MacArthur. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner, 1989.

Finkelstein, Norman H. The Emperor General: A Biography of Douglas MacArthur. Minneapolis, MN: Dillon Press, 1989.

Goulden, Joseph C. Korea: The Untold Story of the War. New York: Times Books, 1982.

James, D. Clayton. The Years of MacArthur. Vol. 3. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

Kawai, K. Japan's American Interlude. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

Long, Gavin. MacArthur as Military Commander. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1969.

MacArthur, Douglas. A Soldier Speaks. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1965.

Perret, Geoffrey. Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur. New York: Random House, 1996.

Petillo, Carol Morris. Douglas MacArthur: The Philippine Years. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

Scott, Robert A. Douglas MacArthur and the Century of War. New York: Facts on File, 1997.

And the Oscar Goes to … Douglas MacArthur

Nearly everyone who came into contact with U.S. Army general Douglas MacArthur commented on his extraordinary presence. Everything from newspaper reports to official documents from the Korean War note the general's corncob pipe and sunglasses, his voice, his gestures, his range of expression, and the charismatic power of his speech. Here are a few out of many quotes describing the commander's remarkable acting skills:

• General Matthew B. Ridgway (1895–1993), who replaced MacArthur as the supreme commander of the UN Far East forces, described a meeting between MacArthur and him in December 1950: "I was again deeply impressed by the force of his personality. To confer with him was an experience that could happen with few others. He was a great actor too, with an actor's instinct for the dramatic—in tone and gesture. Yet so lucid [clear] and so penetrating were his explanations and his analyses that it was his mind rather than his manner or his bodily presence that dominated his listeners." (Source: Matthew B. Ridgway. The Korean War. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967.)
• When Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), army commander, president of the United States, and one-time assistant to MacArthur, was asked if he had ever met MacArthur. He replied: "Not only have I met him, ma'm; I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and four years in the Philippines." (Source: William Manchester. American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978.)
• At a meeting in Tokyo with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others, MacArthur defended his plans for an amphibious attack at Inchon. Army chief of staff J. Lawton Collins (1896–1987) described him as follows: "MacArthur was cool and poised as always. He spoke with confidence and élan as he paced back and forth in his customary fashion. He always gave the impression of addressing not just his immediate listeners but a large audience unseen." (Source: J. Lawton Collins. War in Peacetime: The History and Lessons of Korea. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969.)
• Frank Pace (1912–1988), the secretary of the army who was chosen to deliver the news to MacArthur that he had been relieved of command, formed his own opinion about the purpose of some of the general's theatrics in the Korean War. His idea was not held by others: "I believe that General MacArthur really created the basis for his firing. I felt that the crowds around the Dai-Ichi Building [MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo, Japan] were getting to be very small; I felt that his period of glory there had passed; he was a great student of history; I felt he felt Mr. Truman would be easily defeated [in the next election for president] and that if he could be fired under dramatic circumstances he could return and get the Republican nomination for President and run for President against Mr. Truman. I felt he engineered his own dismissal. The kind of letters that he wrote, a man steeped in military and national tradition knew very well was out of order. I can't believe that he would undertake such an action without realizing what the consequences would have to be. (Source: "An Oral Interview with Frank Pace Jr., New York, N. Y., February 17, 1972, by Jerry N. Hess." Truman Presidential Museum and Library. [Online] http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/pacefj3.htm [accessed on August 14, 2001]).
• John J. Muccio (1900–1989), ambassador to the Republic of Korea during the first years of the Korean War, visited MacArthur in the fall of 1950 and described him thus: "I can still picture him 'posturing' with his corncob pipe. The two of us were alone at the time. MacArthur was a very theatrical personality.... I don't think MacArthur evenblinked his eyes without considering whether it was to his advantage to have his eye blink or not. Everything was thought through, but it became so [much] a part of his nature, and his personality, that it seemed to be automatic. (Source: John J. Muccio. "Oral History Interview Transcripts." Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri. [Online] http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/muccio.htm [accessed on August 14, 2001]).