Douglas MacArthur Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Arthur Herman

  Maps copyright © 2016 by Robert Bull

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the General Douglas MacArthur Foundation for permission to reprint excerpts from Reminiscences by General Douglas MacArthur (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), copyright © 1964 by the General Douglas MacArthur Foundation, and various archival materials housed at the General Douglas MacArthur Foundation including letters, poetry, and speeches. Used with the permission of the General Douglas MacArthur Foundation, MacArthur Square, Norfolk, Virginia 23510.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Herman, Arthur, author.

  Title: Douglas MacArthur : American warrior / Arthur Herman.

  Description: New York : Random House, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015039817 | ISBN 9780812994889 | ISBN 9780812994896 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: MacArthur, Douglas, 1880–1964. | Generals—United States—Biography. | United States—History, Military—20th century. | United States. Army—Biography.

  Classification: LCC E745.M3 H47 2016 | DDC 355.0092—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/​2015039817

  ebook ISBN 9780812994896

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Christopher M. Zucker, adapted for ebook

  Cover Design: Eric White

  Cover photograph: Hulton Archive / Stringer

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Son of the Father

  Chapter 2: Turning Points

  Chapter 3: Glory Days

  Chapter 4: Young Man Going East

  Chapter 5: Countdown to War

  Chapter 6: Into the Fire

  Chapter 7: Fight to the Finish

  Chapter 8: Back to West Point

  Chapter 9: The Tumultuous Years

  Chapter 10: Saving the Army

  Chapter 11: Saving FDR

  Chapter 12: Mission to Manila

  Chapter 13: Waiting for the Enemy

  Chapter 14: Rat in the House

  Chapter 15: When Men Must Die

  Chapter 16: Back to the Wall

  Chapter 17: I Shall Return

  Chapter 18: Taking Supreme Command

  Chapter 19: Green Hell

  Chapter 20: Doing Cartwheel

  Chapter 21: Stepping-Stones to Victory

  Chapter 22: Liberation

  Chapter 23: On to Manila

  Chapter 24: Battleground

  Chapter 25: Downfall

  Chapter 26: Brief Encounters

  Chapter 27: Being Sir Boss

  Chapter 28: Headwinds

  Chapter 29: War Again

  Chapter 30: Inchon and Beyond

  Chapter 31: Reversal of Fortune

  Chapter 32: Endgame

  Chapter 33: Fading Away

  Conclusion

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  By Arthur Herman

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  You can see him in your mind’s eye. The khaki uniform and pressed pants, the gold-braided cap, the sunglasses, the corncob pipe firmly in his teeth and the ramrod-straight back.

  In the mind’s eye we see him wading ashore in the Philippines, sitting in a jeep in Korea, or accepting the surrender of the empire of Japan on board the USS Missouri. As the years passed, Americans grew to see him as a pillar of strength—or a tower of vanity. A man ready to be the savior of his country—or a man the country needed to be saved from.

  He was Douglas MacArthur, arguably the last American public figure to be worshiped unreservedly as a national hero—and arguably the last to bring the romantic stirrings of a Custer or a Robert E. Lee to the American military tradition. Yet he also foresaw the greatest geopolitical shift for his nation’s future since its founding, away from Europe and toward Asia and the Pacific Rim.

  It’s not difficult to find polarizing figures in American history, but none is more intriguing, or more significant, than Douglas MacArthur. Was he prophet or anachronism? Romantic hero or vain mountebank? It’s what biographers and historians have debated back and forth in the half century since his death.

  There are more than twenty-five separate biographies of Douglas MacArthur and many more books on his military campaigns, from World War One and the Philippines to Korea. Most, however, fall into two categories. There are the unrelenting critics like Richard Rovere and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The General and the President (New York, 1951), Gavin Long, MacArthur as Military Commander (London, 1969), Carol Petillo, Douglas MacArthur: The Philippine Years (Bloomington, IN, 1981), Michael Schaller, Douglas MacArthur: The Far Eastern General (Oxford, 1989), and, most recently, Russell Buhite, Douglas MacArthur: Statecraft and Stagecraft in America’s East Asian Policy (Lanham, MD, 2008). Then there’s the category of unashamed adulation, as in Frazier Hunt, The Untold Story of Douglas MacArthur (New York, 1964), Charles Willoughby and John Chamberlain, MacArthur: 1941–1951 (New York, 1954), Courtney Whitney, MacArthur: His Rendezvous with History (New York, 1955), and MacArthur’s own Reminiscences (New York, 1964).

  As for the rest, the most scholarly biography, D. Clayton James’s The Years of MacArthur, 3 volumes (New York, 1970–1985), is balanced but exhausting to read, and has become increasingly out of date. The only single-volume biographies for general readers, William Manchester’s American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964 (Boston, 1978) and Geoffrey Perret, Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur (New York, 1996), both suffer from unevenly critical perspectives on their subject, and never fulfill the promise of their themes or their authors.

  In short, it is time for a biography of MacArthur that gives this larger-than-life figure his full due by peeling back the layers of myth, both pro and con, and revealing the marrow of the man, and his career. By using available archive sources, including the huge collection of materials from the MacArthur Library in Norfolk, Virginia, as well as newly declassified materials from the National Archives and U.S. Center of Military History; and the scholarship of leading Japanese as well as Australian and Korean scholars, it is now possible to set one of the legends of American history—in many ways, an American Churchill—firmly in his time and place and profession. This volume will show how much of the man remained hidden from the public image, and how and why the emergence of Douglas MacArthur as an American hero was actually a process of conscious self-creation.

  This is also the first biography to make use of new Soviet and Chinese archive sources, which shed considerable new light on the events leading up to the outbreak of the war in Korea, particularly the real facts behind China’s intervention in the conflict. In addition, it is the first to make full use of the complete 1998 oral interview with Jean MacArthur—the interview she swore she would never give—which is now safely ensconced in the archives of the MacArthur Memorial.

  What readers will discover in these pages is that far from being a remote figure from the historical past, MacArthur was an individual whose life and career is very much one for our time. For example, more than any other American in the twentieth century, MacArthur understood the importance of Asia for his country’s future destiny. As readers will learn, he was a farsighted prophet who predicted the rise of the Pacific Rim after World War Two
, and who remains a figure as significant in the history of Asia as in American history—possibly even more so.

  “It was crystal clear to me,” MacArthur once wrote, “that the future and, indeed, the very existence of America, were irrevocably intertwined with Asia.”

  He lived that conviction all his life. It motivated many of his key decisions, including in World War Two and Korea, and his impatience with American politicians who still saw Europe as the necessary focus of strategy and foreign policy was legendary.

  By any measure, the man who warned John F. Kennedy not to get involved in Vietnam and who said “Anyone who starts a land war in Asia ought to have his head examined” deserves a fresh new look.

  Indeed, from Vietnam and Nixon’s 1972 opening to China, to the current crisis in Europe—not to mention the emergence of postwar Japan and the “little dragons” including Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, and the rise of mainland China as the next great superpower—MacArthur’s life and career may be more relevant than ever for understanding our world today.

  —

  Certainly no one can deny the epic breadth of that life and career.

  When MacArthur was born in the Little Rock army barracks, American soldiers were still reeling from the massacre at Little Bighorn four years before. When he died, American soldiers were deploying in Vietnam—the war he specifically warned President Kennedy to steer clear of.

  When he entered West Point, generals who had commanded his father in the Civil War were still alive and Orville and Wilbur Wright’s first flight was four years away. When he spoke at West Point for the last time in 1962, Americans were headed into space, and jet bombers carrying nuclear weapons circled the North Pole.

  Over that span of eighty-four years Douglas MacArthur spent his entire career in uniform; indeed, he knew no other life. He was born and died in military hospitals. His first memory, as he recounted in his autobiography, was “the sound of bugles” at his father’s tiny military post where he was born in 1880.

  MacArthur’s death in 1964 was treated as a national event, with his funeral broadcast on network TV with the scale and solemnity befitting the passing of a great national hero—a hero comparable to another titanic figure who died the following year, namely Winston Churchill. Yet even during his lifetime, armies of critics (some of whom had served with him in the field) dismissed him as a second-rate soldier and a vain, pompous, arrogant publicity hound. Then, and later, they could point to his failed defense of the Philippines at the outset of America’s entry into the Second World War, which led to the biggest mass surrender in U.S. military history.

  They pointed to the suppression of the Bonus Marchers during the Depression by troops under his command; his costly campaign in lives and treasure to retake the Philippines; and his disastrous march toward the Yalu after Inchon during the Korean War, which precipitated what MacArthur had assured everyone would never happen—China’s entry into the conflict. Then, as Korea grew into the biggest and most dangerous conflict of the Cold War, MacArthur stunned many by threatening to use nuclear weapons to win it, until a frustrated President Truman dismissed him from command. No wonder biographer William Manchester and others have compared MacArthur to a Greek tragic hero, brought down from the heights of power by his own pride and hubris—or even, some have argued, his incompetence.

  His supporters and apologists, on the other hand, could point to his great success with the amphibious landings at Inchon in September 1950, which turned the tide of war and saved the U.S. Army and its NATO allies from being driven into the sea—and saved South Korea forever from the tyranny of its northern neighbor.

  They could point to his campaign to retake New Guinea from the Japanese, with its brilliant use of land, sea, and air power. They were able to celebrate his bravery during World War One, which should have won him the Medal of Honor and which did make him the youngest brigadier general in American army history; his reorganization and modernization of West Point while superintendent in the twenties, and his tireless work in the thirties as army chief of staff trying to prevent the army’s total collapse under the weight of shrinking budgets, congressional neglect, and the Great Depression.

  Above all, they proudly pointed to his role after Japan’s surrender in World War Two, when he used a combination of firmness and diplomatic skill to bring modern democracy and the traditions of an open society to that defeated country. Those years in Japan earned him the respect and admiration of an entire nation, which still reveres Douglas MacArthur as the equivalent of a modern Founding Father—the man whose actions and policies, as one Japanese historian has put it, “set the course of Japanese history in the second half of the twentieth century.”

  So which version is true?

  My hope is that by the end of this book, readers will know the answer.

  PROLOGUE

  TOKYO

  AUGUST 23, 1950

  Three men in uniform arrived at the airport looking tense and somber. They were America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the men in charge of the nation’s armed services, and they were there on a mission from the president. They were going to tell the supreme commander in the Far East, General Douglas MacArthur, to halt his plans to win the war in Korea.

  At dawn on June 25, 90,000 North Korean soldiers backed by 150 Soviet-built tanks had poured across the border into a defenseless South Korea. Not even five years after the end of World War Two, the Cold War with the Soviet Union had suddenly turned hot.

  The only troops available to repel the North Korean attack had been four undermanned, underequipped divisions in Japan under General Walton Walker. They faced a foe more than twice their number. Day by day, elements of the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry Divisions and the First Cavalry went into battle, almost from the moment they arrived at Seoul airport. Tanks were in such short supply that M4 Shermans on display at Fort Knox were taken down from their concrete pedestals, had their engines reinstalled, and then were shipped overseas to join the fight.

  By the end of July, 94,000 American and South Korean troops were clinging to a narrow perimeter around Pusan at the southern tip of Korea. The fighting was intense, sometimes hand to hand. General Walker told his men there was no retreat, because there was nowhere to go. “We must fight to the end.”

  If they had to die, he said, “at least we die fighting together.”

  From the moment General MacArthur had been named supreme commander in the Korean theater, he had been spending days and weeks trying to find a way not only to save his men at Pusan but also to reverse the tide of war and drive the Communists back. A bold amphibious landing far behind enemy lines, MacArthur believed, could allow him to liberate Seoul, relieve the pressure on Walker, and cut off the North Koreans’ line of retreat before they recovered. The place he had chosen was Inchon, a port city 150 miles northwest of Pusan and 30 miles east of Seoul, the Korean capital now in Communist hands.

  Instead of the American and South Korean armies being cut off and isolated, it would be the Communists. A landing at Inchon, MacArthur predicted, would turn imminent defeat into decisive victory.

  The moment the Joint Chiefs in Washington got wind of MacArthur’s plan, they were aghast. The army’s General Lawton Collins, who had commanded troops in landings in New Georgia during the Second World War, the navy’s Admiral Forrest Sherman, and the marines’ Lemuel Shepherd all remembered the uncertainties and perils of large amphibious operations during the last war—and the high casualties. Collins’s predecessor, General Omar Bradley, had told Congress that the army would never be part of a large amphibious landing again. President Truman and Secretary of Defense George Marshall were equally dubious.

  Meanwhile, the more military experts studied the situation, the dicier it looked. “We drew up a list of nearly every natural and geographic handicap” an amphibious assault might face, one naval staff officer later remembered, “and Inchon had ’em all.”

  And if MacArthur’s plan failed, everyone in Washington realized, i
t would mean catastrophe for the American cause in Asia.

  So Truman had dispatched the Joint Chiefs to convince MacArthur to change his mind: no landing at Inchon. By mid-afternoon of July 23, they and their aides were jammed into a tiny conference room off MacArthur’s office in the Dai-ichi Insurance building in Tokyo, where he had been presiding as de facto ruler of Japan since its surrender five years before.

  At the head of the table was MacArthur. Tall, handsome, ramrod straight in spite of his seventy years, he was the veteran of American wars in Mexico and the Philippines, decorated commander in two world conflicts, and son of a Civil War hero. In 1950 he was the most instantly recognizable American soldier in the world. Many thought it likely he would be the next president of the United States.

  But not if he lost Korea.

  He sat silent and expressionless, his pipe gripped tightly in his teeth, as the Joint Chiefs laid out their objections.

  They pointed out that Inchon’s tides were among the largest and most unpredictable in Asia, and that a landing force might well find itself stranded on a series of mudbanks, becoming sitting ducks for Communist gunners.

  They explained that the channel entering Inchon harbor was narrow and winding, and a ship sunk there by an enemy mine could block the entire channel, making the operation impossible.

  They also protested that MacArthur’s plan meant stripping the Pusan perimeter of the First Marine Brigade, leaving General Walker’s men unnecessarily exposed to a sudden North Korean attack.

  Finally, General Collins stated that even supposing the Inchon landing succeeded and MacArthur did drive on to Seoul, it was his personal belief that MacArthur would be too far away to link up with Walker at Pusan, and that if the Communists counterattacked he could easily find himself trapped with no hope of relief. The best plan, the Joint Chiefs had concluded, was for MacArthur to evacuate Pusan and resign himself, and America, to the fall of South Korea.