MacArthur: Good for America or Bad for America?
 

I come down on the "Bad for America" side.

I will give him credit for 3 things:

1. He was incredibly personally courageous. In WWI he was nominated for a MOH and received 2 Distinguished Service Crosses and a half-dozen Silver Stars.

2. He did a marvelous job of ruling Japan and transitioning it to a modern semi-democratic, non-militaristic society and culture.

3. His Inchon invasion was brilliant.

The downside:

1. His strategy in the Pacific during WWII was terrible. It resulted in a far larger death toll of American ground forces than the strategy proposed by Nimitz. Nimitz wanted to cut off the island fortresses from resupply and weaken them through attrition and bombardment, not amphibious assault. Nimitz reasoned that if we cut off resupply, especially of fuel, that the far-flung islands occupied by Japan were unsustainable by the Japanese. MacArthur won the dispute with a political argument: The American people thirsted for revenge on the Japanese and this was the time to take advantage of that willingness to sustain losses. Roosevelt agreed.

2. In Korea, his tactic at Inchon was brilliant. But he failed to support the commando operations of UNPIK which, at the height of the war, tied-up 80 divisions of Chinese and PRK troops in NK chasing less then a thousand UNPIK and collaborating NK irregulars.

3. Far worse for America was his direct disobedience of the President. We simply cannot allow the military leadership to ever believe they should run things. General George Washington recognized that particular evil when his officers wanted to force the Continental Congress to provide full back-pay that they were promised but never given. Washington faced down his officers by telling them that they were setting the course for the nation: Whether it would become just another dictatorship or whether it would be a democracy. MacArthur, faced with a president who didn't trust him personally and didn't understand military strategy, failed to remember his oath of office. He was fired and he deserved firing.

MacArthur's farewell address at West Point was a fine speech. Anybody who has ever served in the military knows exactly what he means and he spoke from the heart.

MacArthur was a brilliant, brave, complex, flawed man. A danger to his country.

He did get a bit out of hand in the end, his ego got to big.

I disagree on Nimitz Island hopping strategy. That would have taken years, the Japanese soldiers would not surrender and could survive on a handful of rice. Even if we did force them to surrender which I doubt it would have been like Germany after WW1. IE the soldiers were not defeated the government stabbed them in the back. The Japanese army thought they were all that and then some, especially after routing the British and Russians. The only way to fix that was MacArthur's strategy, pound the heck out of them.

The only way to defeat a country is to break its military and break its will to fight. The only way to do this at the time was boots on the ground. You have to engage and kill there soldiers, bomb there cities, sink there ships, and destroy there air force.

Depriving a belligerent nation of its ability to fight, with little loss of life or resources, is an acceptable outcome. Especially for those poor slobs who have to fight and die.

Foretelling the future is not an especially risk-free enterprise. Had the Japanese military survived on widely scattered islands for a few years or for decades, they would not have been a threat to the USA or the Allies. It would be like inmates running the prison. Guess what: They're still in prison. And if they get to be a problem then you crush them.

In any case, it wouldn't have taken more than 4 years to defeat them with little or no loss of life on the Ally's side. Remember, in 1945 we had the Bomb. In the 1950's we demonstrated you can sink an island with a bomb.

Yes but no one knew the bomb was coming, until a lot later. Also the Japanese army was bleeding China to death which at the time was our ally.

Also we didn't want the Russians to intervene.

You can't drag a war like that on for a decade, no war that lasts that long ever ends well for us.

We were trying to get the USSR to attack Japan for 3 years. It was only after we had complete dominance that we quit pressuring Stalin to declare. He feared that Japan would move into Siberia. Stalin never trusted the USA or Britain, though Roosevelt was foolishly maive in his assessment of Stalin. Remember that the USSR finally did declare war, right before the end, in order to size some islands. The Kurils, if memory serves me. We paid dearly in blood for the USSR to demand a place on the USS Missouri.

Concerning not looking into the future for the nuclear bomb -- quite right. Just as one shouldn't look into the future to determine taht the USA could not sustain a lengthy war. We fought a war of pure aggression (on our side) with the Indians for 100 years. Later we fought in Vietnam for 10. We will soon pass the 10 year mark in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is no magic number. There is the political will and the ability to sustain the people. That's a political, not military problem.

great discussion.

I have read quite a bit about ww2 and I believe you both make good points. One thing about Mac is that he did by pass some of japan's strongholds. His stated philosopy was to "hit em where they ain't" a baseball analogy.

We bypassed and isolated numerous japanese strongholds thereby saving a lot of lives.

In William Manchester's book about Mac "MacArthur, American Caesar" Manchester stated that Nimitz's work in the north pacific was much much more bloody than the work that Mac did in the southern part of the pacific. In fact he stated that Mac had the lowest casualty rates of any General in any theater of our army (I believe I have quoted correctly or paraphrased).

Nimitz and Mac represented two different chains of command, Navy and Army.

Altough Mac went astray in the end with his defiance of Trueman, his persona in ww2 may have been a crucial focal point to encourage people and give hope and inspiration. He was quite the showboater though.

His troops on Corrigador though referred to him as "Dugout Doug", so their impression of his courage is somewhat at odds with his media image. I have no explanation for the divergence. Perhaps whenever there was a reporter around he sought out the danger and if not kept down.

he really got into routing the "bonus army" in 1932. always seemed like a real a%^hole to me, kind of like george patton.

When did attrition ever win a war? Answer: never in modern times. Waiting out the Japs was not going to work, as already pointed out. You can always Monday morning quarterback every battle/war, but the fact was he won. His strategy was sound and it worked. If you wanted to argue tactics, how about the losses incurred by the 8th Air Force doing daylight bombing raids over Germany. That by itself didn't work either, we had to go in on the ground.

Korea was the first war run by Washington and showed politicians need to keep their fingers out of battle plans. Inchon was a great success and MacArthur should have been allowed to kick the Chinese as far as possible. The restrictions of not taking it to the enemy because of the yalu River boundary were bogus and gave the enemy an advantage.

Truman should have been booted, not the other way around.

And if you talk to people of the time, the reason MacArthur was put in charge of japan by Truman after WWII was to keep him off American soil. Otherwise, he was going to be a candidate for the 1948 election and Truman was scared of him.

To answer the original question pondered, think of it this way: how much worse off would we have been without him? Answer: significantly, so he was good for America.

So you want the generals running the country instead of elected officials?

When visiting the Hiroshima Peace Park Museum this topic was discussed. The Japanese are very thankful that the Russians never set foot on their land. To this day there are is still bad blood between the Japanese and the Russians.

I don't think Japan would be the country it is today if I wasn't for MacArthur and the bomb.

Nimitz' strategy was to isolate and degrade.

MacArthur's strategy -- island-hopping to get to the Philipines then the Japanese islands starting with Iwo Jima, then Okinawa.

President Roosevelt ordered Nimitz & the USMC to follow the MacArthur strategy. The admiral and the general recognized that it would have been a complete disaster to have 2 strategies competing for the same resources. Both presented their plans to President Roosevelt. He agreed only 1 strategy would serve the country's interest and he chose MacArthur. Nimitz followed orders, resulting in huge losses to the USMC as they conquered one useless island paradise after another in a part of the ocean of no consequence to anybody (except for the Polynesians and Micronesians, of course).

I was talking to my Father in Law, who was a boy when the Japanese came thru Singapore, after storming through Malaysia. He recalled seeing Japanese soldiers riding Bicycles.
He told me the soldiers waved the Malaysion's off...they were searching for the Chinese. Point is-they were dead-set on their mission, and were not going to let gasoline, or the lack of it stop them.

As for MacArthur, I think he was a good soldier, nothing more-nothing less, and he should have been leashed when he went rogue by taking it upon himself to speak for the United States.

Mac pretty well screwed the pooch the first six months of the war in the Phillipines - he earned the "Dugout Doug" nickname the soldiers fighting there gave him.

If you can find a copy of them, "Eagle Against the Sun" and "Plan Orange" give a good summation of how badly he screwed up.

First off, even with nearly a day's warning, he still managed to let nearly all of his air force get caught on the ground and shot to hell, instead of dispersing them to outlying fields and conducting immediate B-17 raids against Japanese air fields on Formosa to prevent such an occurrence, as per long-standing war plans (ie, Plan Orange).

Under Plan Orange, which the army and navy had been revising and tweaking for over 40 years at that point, the plan had been that once war was imminent the army would move lock stock and barrel - all possible supplies, ammo, food, aircraft, equipment, and personnel - into the Bataan Peninsula and turn it into a 25 mile by 25 mile fortified bastion, that could hold out for a year or more if need be, until the navy and a relief force could fight their way across the Pacific - and let the Japanese come to them and batter themselves bloody trying to take it. The position of the Bataan Peninsula, along with Corregidor and the other fortified islands in the entrance, would prevent the Japanese from being able to use Manila Bay as a base for their fleet until one of two things happened - either they conquered Bataan and the fortified islands, or the U.S. Navy and a relief force arrived.

Couple years before the war actually started, old Mac decided he knew better - with his own air force, he decided he was going to try and defend every inch of territory and every island, instead of concentrating his forces, and try to stop the Japanese on the beaches whereever they landed. Several problems with that - first, his troops, particularly the Filipino Scouts, were not that well equipped and trained - even the regulars still had mostly WWI vintage equipment. Even if he hadn't managed to get his air force shot to hell on the first day, it was mostly composed of obsolescent aircraft. Being an island, the Japanese could pretty much land when and where they wanted, and did land in multiple locations.

By the time it became clear his strategy wasn't working and he decided to revert to the original plan and fall back into the Bataan Peninsula, there was no time to stock up - such that his troops ended up being short of food, ammo, and everything else.

Even with that, by the time Bataan surrendered, the Japanese had nearly shot their bolt as well - exhausted and short of supplies themselves. If Mac had followed the original war plan, such that his troops had been better supplied and in better shape, and could have launched a counterattack after letting the Japanese wear themselves out, he could have delivered them a serious defeat and upset to their war plans.

The Cold War comes quickly to mind.