An Irritating Hero
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
An Irritating Hero Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur By Geoffrey Ferret Random House. 663 pp. $32.50. Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific By Eric Bergerud...
...The sole virtue of the situation was that the South and Southwest Pacific Areas were adjacent and mutually supportive...
...In 1944 MacArthur returned to the Philippines as promised...
...He reverted to his permanent rank of major general and President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him military adviser to the Philippine Commonwealth...
...They did go seriously wrong, in part because Hoover's order for the troops to stop short of the Bonus Army's encampment never reached Mac-Arthur...
...Perret excuses him for everything...
...The Far Eastern Air Force was destroyed in a matter of days, leaving Mac-Arthur without air or naval support...
...It was an inglorious, almost pathetic, end to a military career so splendid that Perret calls MacArthur the nation's second greatest soldier, outdone only by Ulysses S. Grant...
...But Perret says a false account written by the assistant chief of staff led previous historians to innocently misrepresent MacArthur's role in the affair...
...566pp...
...Though he scarcely deserved it, MacArthur was named supremecommanderof the Southwest Pacific Area...
...MacArthur is best remembered in this connection for commanding the troops that drove the "Bonus Army" out of Washington in 1932...
...He began to call publicly for all-out war against China in defiance of a "gag" order issued by President Harry S. Truman, who then had no choice but to fire him...
...Two years later he retired to become a field marshal in the Philippine Army...
...Perret is convincing on this point, absolving MacArthur of responsibility for one of the ugliest incidents of the Hoover Administration...
...It is finely and fairly captured by Perret, who is not an iconoclast but doesn't hesitate to identify his subject's failings as a man and as a commander...
...After Papua he promised that there would be no more Bunas, and there weren't...
...Army's officers and men—aided by the Philippine Scouts, a well-trained and highly professional force—not because of MacArthur's leadership...
...In 1930 he reached the top of the ladder, becoming chief of staff of the Army and a temporary four star general...
...Bataan held out as long as it did because of the courage and skill of the U.S...
...Amazingly, that last stand could have been longer still had MacArthur not made many mistakes...
...Not a lot, it turns out, but a skillful writer and historian like Geoffrey Perret can retell a familiar story in a fresh and intelligent way...
...The Japanese almost made it to Port Moresby in Papua before pulling back to heavily fortified positions in the Buna-Gona region...
...He now had a second chance and would make the most of it, once he learned his trade...
...Despite his four stars (he had been promoted again) and long service, he had little or no knowledge of air and sea power, yet commanded a theater consisting entirely of islands that could only be defended, or taken, with the aid of planes and ships...
...Bergerud's descriptions are graphic and portray the War about as vividly, and as disgustingly, as it is possible for words to do...
...Thus, at a point when the United States had barely enough resources to fight one campaign in the Pacific, it was committed to two...
...The reversal caused MacArthur to go over the edge...
...Unlike later in the War, when the Navy's costly Central Pacific drive was pushed forward to Mac Arthur's detriment, American efforts in New Guinea and the Solomons benefited both theaters by forcing Japan to divide its scarce resources between them...
...MacArthur's assignment, a plainly impossible one, was to defend the Philippines against Japan...
...The campaigns went badly at first...
...Though he won in the end, the casualty rate in Papua was higher than that of the Marines during their six-month-long and famously expensive battle on Guadalcanal...
...He failed to fortify and provision Bataan adequately when he had the time to do so, and withdrew to it dangerously late, among other serious errors...
...It had been sending him reinforcements, including heavy bombers it hoped—vainly—would be able to sink an invasion fleet...
...Ironically, their valiant defense made MacArthur a hero at home during the darkest days of the War, obliging Roosevelt to order him to Australia and give him a theater command...
...As chief of staff his main job was to fight against budget cuts during the Great Depression...
...Usually it is overlooked by us, a tradition that goes back to MacArthur himself, who gave the Australians little credit...
...As Perret reconstructs the event, MacArthur showed up in person—something a chief of staff would not normally have done?because he was President Herbert Hoover's designated scapegoat in the event things went wrong...
...His is not a narrative history, however, for he is concerned with the nuts and bolts of what he calls "the most vicious light-infantry war ever fought by industrial nations...
...Old men walked up to old men...
...At last MacArthur's deeds had caught up with his reputation...
...The Navy had always expected to be in sole charge of any Pacific war and deeply resented Mac Arthur's appointment...
...That had been MacArthur's policy too at Buna, but not later...
...units were American victories, and those won by the Australians were "Allied" triumphs...
...It is this phase of the War, the fighting in the Southwest and South Pacific Areas from 1942to 1944, that is Eric Bergerud's subject in Touched with Fire...
...After making a brilliant record at West Point, Douglas rose rapidly, thanks to World War I. By the War's end he was a brigadier general and the most decorated soldier in the Army—with medals he had earned the hard way, by leading troops in battle...
...It is true that the World War I veterans who were petitioning Congress for an early payment of their bonuses were expelled with considerable violence...
...Navy took a coldly logical view: It withdrew the small Asiatic Fleet from the Philippines soon after the fighting broke out...
...He liberated every island except Northern Luzon, where a sizable Japanese force held out until after V-J Day...
...Early in 1942 the Joint Chiefs of Staff divided the Pacific into four theaters of operation: the Southwest Pacific Area, which included Australia, New Guinea, the Netherlands East Indies, and eventually the Philippines...
...Nevertheless, USAFFE's stand on the Bataan Peninsula, which, with Fortress Corregi-dor, controlled Manila Bay, was magnificent...
...He could hardly admit that he lacked the means to execute his mission, and neither could the War Department...
...Ideally, there should have been one Allied supreme commander in the Pacific, as in Europe...
...Only the U.S...
...34.95...
...They had not seen each other since the days of their youth, yet recognition was immediate: "In our subconscious, or whatever, we had always been on Guadalcanal, and always will be...
...It would control the rest of the ocean, and would exercise considerable influence over MacArthur too, for it controlled his shipping and determined the makeup of his Seventh Fleet...
...The Solomons, located in the Navy's South Pacific Area, were less critical, yet Admiral Ernest J. King, the Navy's chief, was bent on retaking them...
...MacArthur threw his troops against them repeatedly, suffering heavy casualties to no purpose...
...It was forced to accept that politics and geography dictated an Army theater in the Southwest Pacific...
...Touched with Fire: The Land War in the South Pacific By Eric Bergerud Viking...
...In 1935 MacArthur completed his tour as chief of staff...
...This enormously higher casualty rate was a function of the Central Pacific policy of throwing masses of men against well-entrenched troops...
...He could not keep the Army from shrinking, but he managed to stave off massive reductions that would have crippled the service...
...all blame is assigned to his senior officers, or the War Department, or whoever...
...It was basically what he labels a "Squad War," with very small units battling in some of the worst battle terrain on earth: steaming impenetrable jungles where men lived and died in the mud, always diseased, tormented by insects almost as much as by enemy fire...
...Over the next two years his forces sustained just 20,000 casualties—fewer than the Marines experienced on tiny Iwo Jima—while advancing almost 2,000 miles...
...Yet even if you have read all four of those books you will find Old Soldiers Never Die rewarding...
...One veteran of the 1 st Marine Division tells of going to a reunion for the first time late in life...
...His having failed miserably notwithstanding, MacArthur returned home to be acclaimed a national hero before he rapidly faded away—which he had told Congress was the fate of old soldiers...
...Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), embracing all Commonwealth and American troops...
...the South Pacific Area, consisting of the Solomons and related islands, and the Central and North Pacific Areas...
...First he won it with his masterful landing at Inchon, then he drew the Chinese in, turning what had been a superb victory into a protracted and bloody stalemate...
...author, "A Democracy at War: America s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" WHAT MORE is there to say about General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, one of the greatest soldiers and most annoying men America has ever produced...
...More than any other American author to date, he does justice to the Australian Army, the best of the three he argues...
...New Guinea being the gateway to Australia, it had to be defended...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...Here the author is not persuasive...
...His troops sustained 62,000 casualties while destroying a Japanese garrison of 350,000 men...
...But the Korean War was another story...
...By comparison, on Okinawa, the climax of the Central Pacific campaign, the Allies suffered 50,000 casualties while disposing of a Japanese force of fewer than 120,000...
...Interpretive-ly Perret is about midway between Manchester and James, who, though respectful of MacArthur's achievements, is scathingly critical of him at many points...
...But that was the Navy's only concession...
...The confrontation left a stain on his reputation that Perret argues is unjustified...
...Both Bergerud and Perret agree that if MacArthur had been the sole supreme commander in the Pacific, the American path to victory would have been considerably less bloody...
...He kept the Japanese off balance, attacking where he was least expected to and bypassing many obvious targets...
...It was a war of annihilation too, with no quarter asked or given by those fighting at the lowest level of human existence...
...The last three were commanded by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz...
...Although remembered only by military historians today, these campaigns were some of the most brilliant ever conducted by an American general...
...But it remains afloat, because Bergerud is an able writer who interviewed many veterans to outstanding effect...
...We need reminding that to soldiers war is all about the little picture—the squad, the platoon, the company at most...
...After the War MacArthur won further distinction as the American military governor of Japan, where he created a modem democracy from scratch...
...But when Japan launched the Pacific War on December 7, 1941, he was recalled to active duty, promoted to lieutenant general and named head of U.S...
...The definitive scholarly work is D. Clayton James' three-volume The Years of MacArthur (1970-85...
...Since Douglas grew up on Army posts, it was hardly a surprise when he decided to become a soldier?although his older brother, Arthur III, chose the Navy instead...
...He also includes an immense amount of detailed information about the environment, the armies, their weapons, morale, and the like—a load of information that at times threatens to sink the book...
...Roosevelt, who could have changed this very wasteful arrangement, for reasons of his own never did...
...Bergerud draws this picture as well as any nonfic-tion writer has, but, fittingly, he gives the last word to the veterans themselves...
...In the summer of 1942 the Japanese Army invaded the Papuan Peninsula of New Guinea, and the Japanese Navy invaded the Solomon Islands to the northeast of Australia...
...Douglas was the son of a professional soldier, Arthur MacArthur, who had a fabulous career of his own, beginning as a lieutenant of volunteers in the Civil War and ending as the highest ranking officer in the regular Army...
...MacArthur believed he could build a force capable of defending the islands by 1946, the year the Commonwealth was scheduled to achieve independence...
...Bataan didnot fall until April 1942, while Corregidor held out until May, a tremendous defense that threw the Japanese timetable off and probably saved Australia...
...This is not a book to everyone's taste...
...In his communiques, for example, battles won by U.S...
...At heavy cost to his men, MacArthur did learn a crucial lesson: how to combine air, sea and ground power effectively...
...Touched with Fire is a highly useful corrective to histories that focus exclusively on strategy and the big picture...
...General readers may be acquainted with William Manchester's worshipful American Caesar (1978...
...MacArthur's life almost seems more like fiction than history...
...Old Soldiers Never Die is the best one-volume biography of Mac-Arthur yet, and it is an excellent read as well...
Vol. 79 • August 1996 • No. 5
