Flying Macarthur To Victory

“I shall return!” It was the most memorable phrase of the war for the Pacific in the 1940s. For many people, Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur’s vow to recapture the Philippines and the footage of him wading ashore with the troops were all that was needed to characterize him as egotistical and severe. Flying MacArthur to Victory is the World War II diary of the general’s personal pilot, Weldon E. (“Dusty”) Rhoades. Rhoades’s days as a transport pilot ended when he got the assignment to deliver documents marked “For MacArthur’s Eyes Only.” After the documents changed hands the general invited Rhoades to be the personal pilot of the Pacific theater’s commander in chief. From that day in October, 1943, until his discharge in January, 1946, Rhoades not only had a front-row seat for confrontations and strategic discussions between MacArthur and his chief of staff, Gen. Richard K. Sutherland, but also witnessed their behavior in the private shadow of their awesome responsibilities. The World War II diary of Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur's personal pilot, Weldon E. Rhoades, chronicles the daily hardships of the world's most all-encompassing war. Rhoades's front-row observations show military personnel performing their duties under the stress generated from a cycle of intense activity, unbearable boredom, frustration, and always, the pain of separation from loved ones. Here also are the dramatic confrontations, strategic discussions, and off-camera personality of one of history's most powerful generals, a man often branded by the public as egotistical and severe.

"I shall return!" It was the most memorable phrase of the war for the Pacific in the 1940s. For many people, Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur's vow to recapture the Philippines and the footage of him wading ashore with the troops were all that was needed to characterize him as egotistical and severe.

New York Times Bestseller The final volume of the magisterial Pacific War Trilogy from acclaimed historian Ian W. Toll, “one of the great storytellers of War” (Evan Thomas). In June 1944, the United States launched a crushing assault on the Japanese navy in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The capture of the Mariana Islands and the accompanying ruin of Japanese carrier airpower marked a pivotal moment in the Pacific War. No tactical masterstroke or blunder could reverse the increasingly lopsided balance of power between the two combatants. The War in the Pacific had entered its endgame. Beginning with the Honolulu Conference, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with his Pacific theater commanders to plan the last phase of the campaign against Japan, Twilight of the Gods brings to life the harrowing last year of World War II in the Pacific, when the U.S. Navy won the largest naval battle in history; Douglas MacArthur made good his pledge to return to the Philippines; waves of kamikazes attacked the Allied fleets; the Japanese fought to the last man on one island after another; B-29 bombers burned down Japanese cities; and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized in atomic blasts. Ian W. Toll’s narratives of combat in the air, at sea, and on the beaches are as gripping as ever, but he also reconstructs the Japanese and American home fronts and takes the reader into the halls of power in Washington and Tokyo, where the great questions of strategy and diplomacy were decided. Drawing from a wealth of rich archival sources and new material, Twilight of the Gods casts a penetrating light on the battles, grand strategic decisions and naval logistics that enabled the Allied victory in the Pacific. An authoritative and riveting account of the final phase of the War in the Pacific, Twilight of the Gods brings Toll’s masterful trilogy to a thrilling conclusion. This prize-winning and best-selling trilogy will stand as the first complete history of the Pacific War in more than twenty-five years, and the first multivolume history of the Pacific naval war since Samuel Eliot Morison’s series was published in the 1950s.

A Finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History at the New-York Historical Society The definitive account of General Douglas MacArthur's rise during World War II, from the author of the bestseller The Admirals. World War II changed the course of history. Douglas MacArthur changed the course of World War II. MACARTHUR AT WAR will go deeper into this transformative period of his life than previous biographies, drilling into the military strategy that Walter R. Borneman is so skilled at conveying, and exploring how personality and ego translate into military successes and failures. Architect of stunning triumphs and inexplicable defeats, General MacArthur is the most intriguing military leader of the twentieth century. There was never any middle ground with MacArthur. This in-depth study of the most critical period of his career shows how MacArthur's influence spread far beyond the war-torn Pacific.

World War II was a media war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the press to a great extent, of course, but as the war progressed, the media also came to influence commanders’ decisions on the battlefield. Rescuing General Douglas MacArthur from the Philippines in deference to public opinion forced the Allies to divide the Pacific War between two competing theaters. Omar Bradley’s concern over US public opinion convinced General Dwight D. Eisenhower to include Americans in the final assault against Axis forces in Tunisia. General George S. Patton Jr. raced across Sicily to gain media attention and British respect. General Mark Clark’s hunger for publicity and the glory of capturing Rome allowed an entire German army to escape destruction. Negative media pressure and the fear of V-1 bombs damaging British morale provided the impetus for the breakout of Normandy and the unsuccessful attempt to liberate the Netherlands in the fall of 1944. British general Bernard Montgomery’s remarks to the press during the Battle of the Bulge almost caused him to lose his command and created tremendous ill feelings among the Allies. Soon afterward, Eisenhower was forced to hold the dangerously exposed city of Strasbourg because of French public opinion. By V-E Day, even Eisenhower was attempting to get more publicity for American, as opposed to Allied, units. The Media Offensive offers a new way to understand military-media relations during World War II. The press and public opinion shaped not only how the conflict was seen but also how it was fought. Alexander Lovelace demonstrates that the US military repeatedly discovered that the best effects resulted from accurate news stories. Truthful news reporting—defined as news reporting that accurately depicts the events it describes—could not be created by the military or even the media but could only emerge through a free press searching for it. Lovelace recasts World War II in a new and unique fashion by placing media and public opinion at the center of battlefield decision-making. Unlike past scholarship on the media during World War II that focused on censorship, propaganda, or the adventure stories of war correspondents, The Media Offensive takes the historiography of war reporting in a new direction. In what could be called “the new history of war reporting,” the focus is switched from how the military controlled reporters to how military decisions were shaped by the press.

From the liberation of the Philippines to the Japanese surrender, the final volume of John C. McManus's trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War “Brilliant [and] riveting… a truly great book.”—Gen. David Petraeus • “Triumphant [and] compelling.”—Richard Frank • “McManus is one of the best—if not the best—World War II historians working today.”—World War II magazine The dawn of 1945 finds a US Army at its peak in the Pacific. Allied victory over Japan is all but assured. The only question is how many more months—or years—of fight does the enemy have left. John C. McManus, winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History, concludes his magisterial series, described by the Wall Street Journal as being “as vast and splendid as Rick Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Liberation Trilogy,” with this brilliant final volume. On the island of Luzon, a months-long stand-off between US and Japanese troops finally breaks open, as American soldiers push into Manila, while paratroopers and amphibious invaders capture nearby Corregidor. The Philippines are soon liberated, and Allied strategists turn their eyes to China, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the Japanese home islands themselves. Readers will walk in the boots of American soldiers and officers, braving intense heat, rampant disease, and a by-now suicidal enemy, determined to kill as many opponents as possible before defeat, and they will encounter Japanese soldiers faced with the terrible choice between capitulation or doom. At the same time, this outstanding narrative lays bare the titanic ego and ambition of the Pacific War’s most prominent general, Douglas MacArthur, and the complex challenges he faced in Japan’s unconditional surrender and America’s lengthy occupation.

Cracking the enemy's radio code is a task so urgent and so difficult that it demands the military's best minds and most sophisticated technology. But when the coded messages are in a language as complex as Japanese, decoding problems multiply dramatically.

This “important comprehensive study” of WWII in the Pacific examines the high-level decision-making and strategy that led to victory (Roanoke Times). Once the stories have been told of battles won and lost, most of what happens in a war remains a mystery. So it has been with accounts of World War II in the Pacific, a complex conflict whose nature is often obscured by simple chronological narratives. In The Pacific War, William B. Hopkins, a Marine Corps veteran of the Pacific war and respected military history author, opens the story of the Pacific campaign to a broader and deeper view. Hopkins investigates the strategies, politics, and personalities that shaped the fighting. His regional approach to this complex war conducted on land, sea, and air offers an insightful perspective on how this multifaceted conflict unfolded. As expansive as the immense reaches of the Pacific, and as focused as the most intensive pinpoint attack on a strategic island, Hopkins’ account offers a fresh way of understanding the hows—and more significantly, the whys—of the Pacific War.