MacArthur, Douglas A. (1880-1964)

Naval Historical Center #62439

One of the most controversial figures in American history, Douglas MacArthur was the son of Civil War general and Medal of Honor recipient Arthur MacArthur. Born at Little Rock Barracks, Arkansas, he graduated from West Point in 1903 at the head of his class, despite the distraction of having his mother, whom he called “Pinkie”, living in a house just outside the gates all four years. It is not unreasonable to speculate that MacArthur’s character reflected a lifelong need to live up to the expectations of Pinkie.

MacArthur demonstrated his considerable physical courage in the First World War, where he became the assistant division commander of 42 (“Rainbow”) Division and often led it into combat from the front ranks. His courage probably derived from his fatalism and sense of destiny. His postwar career was equally illustrious. He served as superintendent of West Point, where he instituted a number of important reforms (but was unable to completely abolish hazing). He was a member of the Billy Mitchell court-martial. He was the commander of Army forces in the Philippines, as was his father before him, and developed a strong devotion to the Commonwealth that persisted until the end of the Second World War. He was appointed Chief of Staff, the Army’s highest post, in the 1930s.

It was as Chief of Staff that MacArthur’s darker side first became evident to the public. Ordered by President Hoover to maintain order in Washington during the Bonus March, he apparently exceeded his orders and had the marchers violently dispersed. Many of the marchers had brought their families with them, and it was later claimed that two infants were smothered by tear gas during the confrontation.

After completing his tour as Chief of Staff in 1938, MacArthur resigned from the U.S. Army to organize the Philippine armed forces, and accepted the rank of field marshal from the Commonwealth government. This shocked his peers, who thought this was beneath the dignity of a former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. The importance of this title to MacArthur is proven by photographs showing him still wearing the cap of a Philippine field marshal as late as 1944. Still in the Philippines when war broke out in Europe, MacArthur was recalled to active duty in the U.S. Army on 26 July 1941, the same day the oil embargo against Japan was announced. MacArthur was given the rank of lieutenant general and placed in command of Armed Forces, Far East.

MacArthur and the first Philippines campaign. MacArthur believed that the Philippines could be successfully defended against Japan, a conclusion contrary to twenty years of staff studies. He hoped to organize a Philippine Army of over twenty divisions, and believed he had a trump card: the then-new B-17 Flying Fortress, whose capabilities were greatly overestimated prior to its first trial of combat. Considerable reinforcements, including 33 of the precious B-17s, had been sent to the Philippines, and more were on the way, when war broke out.

MacArthur saw his air force go up in smoke the first day of the war, under circumstances that have never been adequately explained (but see the entry for Lewis Brereton). His beach defenses collapsed, and he finally ordered the retreat to the Bataan Peninsula that was anticipated in the older war plans. Because he had delayed the order to retreat, inadequate supplies of food were stockpiled in the peninsula, which would greatly increase the suffering of its defenders in the subsequent siege.

In the 1970s, historians discovered that MacArthur had accepted a bonus of half a million dollars from the Commonwealth government in February 1942. Although this was allowed for in his contract to organize the Philippine armed forces, the timing and circumstances of the award give the appearance of impropriety. The award came just before MacArthur saw to it that Manuel Quezon, the Commonwealth president, was evacuated from Corregidor by submarine.

MacArthur toured the Bataan front just once during the entire campaign.This earned him the moniker “Dugout Doug” from some of his troops, who attributed it to lack of physical courage. This is implausible, given the considerable physical courage MacArthur displayed throughout his career. The true explanation may be lack of moral courage: MacArthur had promised his troops that relief was coming, and when it became clear that Washington was going to abandon the Philippines, MacArthur could not face his troops and tell them the truth.

MacArthur’s overall performance in the Philippines was so lackluster that he arguably should have been relieved of command. But MacArthur had an astonishing flair for public relations. Eisenhower, a former MacArthur aide, once joked that he had “studied dramatics” under MacArthur for seven years in the Philippines. MacArthur’s supporters spun the first Philippines campaign as a kind of Battle of the Alamo that had thrown off the Japanese timetable and bought the country precious breathing space. (In fact, the Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia was completed ahead of schedule, though Bataan itself took longer than the Japanese anticipated.) MacArthur himself was spun as “the Lion of Luzon” and “America’s best general.”

Roosevelt, who had taken MacArthur’s full measure, knew he could not risk letting MacArthur be captured by the Japanese; nor would he return him to the States to become a possible political rival. Instead, Roosevelt awarded MacArthur the Medal of Honor, four stars, and command of the Southwest Pacific Area, ordering him to quit Corregidor and escape to Australia. On 11 March 1942 MacArthur reluctantly complied, publicly declaring that he understood his assignment to be to organize the relief of the Philippines. “I shall return” became a memorable rallying call, but it was typical of MacArthur that the phrase was not “We shall return.” As later wags put it, “With the help of God and a few Marines, MacArthur returned to the Philippines.” Roosevelt likely hoped that the presence of a prominent American general in Australia would boost the reputation of the U.S. in that country.

MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific. MacArthur proceeded to build a personality cult within his headquarters. Many of his staff officers had escaped from Corregidor with him, and tremendous personal loyalty was expected of them. MacArthur himself lived lavishly, having demanded (and gotten) his own train from the Australian government, which included a flatcar for his limousine (purchased with part of the bonus from Quezon and originally used by the Prince of Wales during a state visit to the island continent.) Marshall once told MacArthur, “General, you don’t have a staff. You have a court.” By contrast with Nimitz, MacArthur never made any effort to establish a joint staff. His staff was organized and run as an Army staff, and Allied and U.S. Navy officers were included as technical assistants only.

MacArthur's Chief of Staff, Richard Sutherland, was typical of the kind of men with which MacArthur surrounded himself. Sutherland was a captain in Tientsin in 1938, when MacArthur brought him onto his staff. Sutherland rose to major general by the time war broke out, without ever having commanded a unit larger than a company. This was bad enough, but MacArthur aggravated the problem by giving Sutherland enormous control over most aspects of planning and operations.

The Navy’s Plan Orange for a Pacific war anticipated an island-hopping campaign across the Central Pacific. MacArthur demanded that the cream of American resources be sent to the Southwest Pacific instead, for a campaign that would return him to the Philippines. The Philippines were not an unreasonable objective; capture of the islands and control of the surrounding waters would cut Japan’s lifeline to the oil fields of the Netherlands East Indies. But the Philippines are a long way from Tokyo, and returning to the Philippines from Australia implied a prolonged campaign in some of the worst jungle terrain on the face of the planet. MacArthur got his first taste of what this meant during the bloody siege of Buna, in which an Australian and two American divisions had the guts torn out of them in futile attempts to take strong Japanese field fortifications without adequate air, artillery, or tank support. Thereafter, MacArthur adopted the leapfrog tactics pioneered by the Navy in the Aleutians and the Solomons, bypassing enemy strongholds and leaving them to wither on the vine. His New Guinea campaign of 1943 was strategically brilliant and put him on the threshold of the Philippines by mid-1944. What was not appreciated at the time was that MacArthur had considerably assistance from the code breakers, who were able to tell him which points on the New Guinea coast were defended and which were not.

However, MacArthur had split the Allied effort in the Pacific. The Navy was determined not to serve under MacArthur, and MacArthur was determined not to serve under the Navy, so the Southwest Pacific and Pacific commands were kept independent of each other. The Navy prepared for and executed its long-planned drive across the Central Pacific at the same time that MacArthur was driving up the coast of New Guinea. So great were the Allied resources by then that this seeming violation of the principle of mass was transformed into a one-two punch that prevented the Japanese from effectively concentrating their defenses against either drive.

Personality and character. One of MacArthur’s blind spots was his relations with his allies. He treated Australian and New Zealand troops with wholly undeserved contempt, assigning them mopping-up duties and almost never acknowledging their contributions in his communiqués. Part of the problem may have been that MacArthur took pride in being a lifelong professional soldier, the son of a professional soldier, while most Australian commanders were reservists between the world wars. Another part of the problem may have been that 8 Australian Division had failed to hold Singapore for as long as MacArthur’s Philippine troops had held Bataan, a comparison from which MacArthur drew unwarranted generalizations. MacArthur did not seem to understand at first how terrible the terrain in New Guinea was, and he was biting in his criticism of Australian militia who fought at Kokoda and Milne Bay, telling Marshall that "The enemy's defeat at Milne Bay must not be accepted as a measure of relative fighting capacity of the troops involved."

Another of MacArthur’s blind spots was his attitude towards the Navy. Though he got along well with Halsey and with his own Southwest Pacific naval commander, Thomas Kinkaid, MacArthur never forgave the Navy for not taking greater risks to relieve the Philippines. He constantly tried to undercut Nimitz, the top naval commander in the Pacific. In June 1942, MacArthur even claimed to Marshall that, while serving as Chief of Staff, he had uncovered a Navy conspiracy to take complete control of the national defense. His supporters claimed that MacArthur’s strategy saved American lives by leapfrogging Japanese strongholds, while the Navy’s campaign in the Central Pacific was throwing away American lives in unnecessary frontal attacks on small islands where there was no room for maneuver. This ungenerous attitude ignored the extremely heavy casualties suffered by MacArthur’s forces at Buna and during the second Philippines campaign, and it minimized the vital contribution of the Central Pacific campaign to cracking the inner Japanese defenses.

MacArthur was incredibly egotistical and an erratic if sometimes brilliant strategist. He frequently ignored signals intelligence in favor of his own intuition, and on several occasions badly underestimated enemy strength. Hastings (2007) says of him that "He made no jokes and possessed no small talk, though he would occasionally talk baseball to enlisted men, in attempts to deceive them that he was human." His monumental tomb at Norfolk, Virginia, describes him as the “Defender of Australia, Liberator of the Philippines, Conqueror of Japan,” which is taking rather a lot of credit to himself. Though usually thought of as a political conservative, a close examination of MacArthur’s record reveals an opportunist lacking in any real political convictions. His reputation as a conservative may be a consequence of his intense dislike for successive Democratic presidents as well as his unsuccessful postwar campaign for the Republican nomination for president.

MacArthur’s egotism and grandiloquence played surprisingly well with the Japanese during the postwar Allied occupation. He was able to maintain order, and he forced democratic reforms on Japan that would transform Japanese society. On the other hand, he decided very early on that the Emperor was much too useful to be tried as a war criminal, and as a result the Tokyo war crimes trials were a travesty of justice, contrasting sharply with the Nuremberg proceedings.

Service record

References

Boatner (1996)

Connaughton (2001)

Dupuy et al. (1992)

Frank (1990)

Generals.dk (accessed 2007-11-26)

Hastings (2007)

Marston (2005)

Morton (1953)

Smith (2007)

The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia © 2007-2008, 2010 by Kent G. Budge. Index

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