[March 11th marks the 80th anniversary of General Douglas MacArthur’s famous departure from the Philippines. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and four other aspects of the war’s Pacific Theater, leading up to a special post on the U.S.-Filipino relationship.]
On how one
moment exemplifies the best and worst of a controversial military leader.
As I’ve written many
times in this space, war is a consistently horrific reality that should be
avoided as much and as fully as possible—but when inevitable wars happen, they
do offer the opportunity for soldiers, individually and collectively, to model
the kinds of active patriotic service and courage I traced in Of
Thee I Sing. There aren’t many American soldiers who have had the
chance to do so across three distinct wartime conflicts, but that was indeed
the case with Douglas
MacArthur: after beginning his military career during Woodrow Wilson’s 1914
expedition to Veracruz with individual
acts of bravery that nearly earned him the Medal of Honor, MacArthur went
on to be nominated twice for such a Medal (and to receive many other
commendations including 7 Silver Stars and 2 Distinguished Service Crosses) for
his extensive
World War I service and then to finally receive that highest US
military honor for his leadership during World War II. There are few
American military resumes that can compete with even that brief summary of
MacArthur’s service.
At the same
time, there are few military leaders who have been part of even one
controversial domestic scandal, and MacArthur was at the heart of two across
multiple decades. The most famous was his rebellious and quite possibly illegal
behavior during the Korean War, when, determined to foment a full-scale war
with China (and thus by proxy global communism), MacArthur repeatedly defied
orders from President Truman, leading Truman
eventually to remove him from command altogether. But I would argue that
even more scandalous were his actions
against the “Bonus Army” in July 1932, violent and destructive choices about
which I’ve written
extensively here and
elsewhere; as journalists Drew Pearson and Robert Allen put it, MacArthur’s
treatment of the Bonus marchers was “unwarranted, unnecessary, insubordinate,
harsh, and brutal.” MacArthur sued those journalists for defamation, but their countersuit
revealed other misbehavior on his part and he
ended up settling out of court and paying the journalists more than $10,000—not
exactly a headline that screams “iconic military hero and active patriot.”
Each of those
moments and stories, histories and contexts is complex and distinct, but
together they paint a picture of one of the most multi-layered, and perhaps
most contradictory, figures in American history. And I would argue that all of
those layers and contradictions are necessary if we’re to grapple fully with
the most famous single moment in MacArthur’s life, and indeed one of the most
famous in American military history: his March
11th, 1942 departure from the Philippines. That moment turns out
to be pretty fraught, not only because MacArthur was abandoning the islands to more
than two years of Japanese rule and destruction (after having promised not
to do so), but also because his superiors in Washington ordered him to revise
his statement to “We shall return” and the ever-egotistical general refused
to do so. But at the same time, MacArthur continued to lead Allied forces to
victory throughout the Pacific Theater over the next two years, leading up to
his, yes, return
to the Philippines in October 1944. All of which is to say, when MacArthur
announced “People
of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our
forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the blood of our two
peoples,” he was modeling once more all the worst and best of this unquestionably
iconic military and American life.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other aspects of the Pacific Theater you’d highlight?
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