• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 951 0

of which notions he seemed eager to dismiss. Foremost among proponents of the “man of destiny” view of history, he was bent upon becoming the lone star of America’s Pacific war. Everything within his compass was subordinated to that purpose. A blizzard of personal publicity accompanied his every movement, readily supported by U.S. newspaper moguls—Hearst, McCormick, Patterson—who loved the general. Twelve full-length biographies were published in the course of the war, their flavour conveyed by a sample title, MacArthur the Magnificent, which did nothing to check his egomania.

The senior Allied commander who afterwards spoke most warmly of MacArthur was Gen. Sir Alan Brooke, the dour, clever Northern Irishman who was Britain’s principal wartime chief of staff. Brooke’s assessment was astonishingly effusive: “From everything I saw of him37, he was the greatest general of the last war. He certainly showed a far greater strategic grasp than Marshall.” Such a testimonial should not be altogether ignored, but Brooke knew little of either MacArthur or the Japanese war. Top Americans obliged to work with the “hero of Bataan” adopted a much more sceptical view. His fitness for high command was disputed by many senior officers, foremost among them the chief of naval operations, Admiral Ernest King, another Olympian autocrat. King’s daughter described her father as an entirely even-tempered man: “He was always angry.” Such was the admiral’s personal animus against the general that, at a joint chiefs of staff meeting, Marshall—himself no admirer of MacArthur—felt obliged to thump the table and silence a tirade from King: “I will not have any meeting carried on with this hatred.”

MacArthur’s critics believed that an advance across the south-west Pacific was irrelevant to America’s strategic requirements, and was promoted only by the general’s ambition to liberate the Philippines. He shamelessly manipulated communiqués about his forces’ achievements, personally selected photographs of himself for press release, deprived subordinates of credit for successes, shrugged off his own responsibility for failures. He was a man of fierce passions, whom “joy or sorrow38 would set…off on lusty zooms or steep dives,” in the words of a subordinate. “At the risk of being naïve39 and just plain dumb,” wrote Maj.-Gen. St. Clair Streett, later commander of the Thirteenth Air Force, assessing Pacific command in October 1942, “the major obstacle for a sane military solution of the problem [is] General MacArthur…even the President himself might find his hands tied in dealing with the general.” The sooner MacArthur was out of the Pacific, thought Streett, the sooner would it be possible to establish a rational command structure for the theatre.

A senior British airman, no stranger to tensions in his own nation’s high command, was nonetheless awed by those between America’s armed forces: “The violence of inter-service rivalry40…in those days had to be seen to be believed, and was an appreciable handicap to their war effort.” Even where armed services dislike each other institutionally, successful cooperation can be achieved if individual commanders forge working relationships. MacArthur, however, was interested in achieving harmony only in pursuit of his own objectives. Admiral King likewise placed the long-term interests of the U.S. Navy far above any tactical conveniences related to fighting the Japanese. No overall Pacific supreme commander was ever appointed, because neither army nor navy could stomach the explicit triumph of the other service. And even if the resultant division of authority impeded the defeat of Japan, so prodigious were U.S. resources that the nation felt able to indulge it.

MacArthur was never ill. When there was nowhere more distant to go, he paced his office to assuage his chronic restlessness. 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. Marshall observed that MacArthur had a court, not a staff. Intimates of the “Bataan