Macarthur Reconsidered

James Ellman digs deep, connects the dots, and concludes that General Douglas MacArthur was decidedly not a military genius. One of America's most controversial generals, Douglas MacArthur’s rise through the U.S. Army’s ranks was meteoric. However, he did not lead large formations of men in combat until he assumed command of forces in the Philippines in 1941. When war commenced with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, MacArthur’s performance on the battlefield was a failure: he underestimated the Japanese, and his poorly trained forces were outmaneuvered and outfought by a much smaller invading force. However, in what became a repeating hallmark of his career, he successfully portrayed his actions to much of the American people as brilliant and heroic regardless of victory or defeat. After fleeing to Australia, MacArthur famously announced, “I will return,” and followed through on a quest to retake Manila regardless of its impact on Allied global strategy or its cost in American, Australian, and Filipino blood. In his subsequent role as America’s shogun in Tokyo, MacArthur was again surprised by an enemy he underestimated. The Korean War yielded his greatest victory, at Inchon, but also his greatest defeat, along the Yalu River. Unwilling to accept anything but complete victory, he openly defied President Truman: MacArthur fatally undermined chances for an early peace, planned to seed a great swath of enemy territory with radioactive cobalt, and attempted to widen a conflict which threatened to become a third world war. Raging against his subsequent firing, he only truly faded away after he was publicly criticized by a panoply of America’s greatest WWII generals. Today, MacArthur still polarizes. Many biographies agree he was a great and patriotic leader marred by a few failures. Ellman argues the opposite: MacArthur was a lackluster battlefield commander who suffered stunning defeats while undermining the command structure of our military.

A new, definitive life of an American icon, the visionary general who led American forces through three wars and foresaw his nation’s great geopolitical shift toward the Pacific Rim—from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of Gandhi & Churchill Douglas MacArthur was arguably the last American public figure to be worshipped unreservedly as a national hero, the last military figure to conjure up the romantic stirrings once evoked by George Armstrong Custer and Robert E. Lee. But he was also one of America’s most divisive figures, a man whose entire career was steeped in controversy. Was he an avatar or an anachronism, a brilliant strategist or a vainglorious mountebank? Drawing on a wealth of new sources, Arthur Herman delivers a powerhouse biography that peels back the layers of myth—both good and bad—and exposes the marrow of the man beneath. MacArthur’s life spans the emergence of the United States Army as a global fighting force. Its history is to a great degree his story. The son of a Civil War hero, he led American troops in three monumental conflicts—World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. Born four years after Little Bighorn, he died just as American forces began deploying in Vietnam. Herman’s magisterial book spans the full arc of MacArthur’s journey, from his elevation to major general at thirty-eight through his tenure as superintendent of West Point, field marshal of the Philippines, supreme ruler of postwar Japan, and beyond. More than any previous biographer, Herman shows how MacArthur’s strategic vision helped shape several decades of U.S. foreign policy. Alone among his peers, he foresaw the shift away from Europe, becoming the prophet of America’s destiny in the Pacific Rim. Here, too, is a vivid portrait of a man whose grandiose vision of his own destiny won him enemies as well as acolytes. MacArthur was one of the first military heroes to cultivate his own public persona—the swashbuckling commander outfitted with Ray-Ban sunglasses, riding crop, and corncob pipe. Repeatedly spared from being killed in battle—his soldiers nicknamed him “Bullet Proof”—he had a strong sense of divine mission. “Mac” was a man possessed, in the words of one of his contemporaries, of a “supreme and almost mystical faith that he could not fail.” Yet when he did, it was on an epic scale. His willingness to defy both civilian and military authority was, Herman shows, a lifelong trait—and it would become his undoing. Tellingly, MacArthur once observed, “Sometimes it is the order one disobeys that makes one famous.” To capture the life of such an outsize figure in one volume is no small achievement. With Douglas MacArthur, Arthur Herman has set a new standard for untangling the legacy of this American legend. Praise for Douglas MacArthur “This is revisionist history at its best and, hopefully, will reopen a debate about the judgment of history and MacArthur’s place in history.”—New York Journal of Books “Unfailingly evocative . . . close to an epic . . . More than a biography, it is a tale of a time in the past almost impossible to contemplate today as having taken place, with MacArthur himself as a figure perhaps too remote to understand, but all the more important to encounter.”—The New Criterion “With Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior, the prolific and talented historian Arthur Herman has delivered an expertly rendered, compulsively readable account that does full justice to MacArthur’s monumental achievements without slighting his equally monumental flaws.”—Commentary

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.

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.

General Douglas MacArthur's storied career is inextricably linked to Asia. His father, Arthur, served as Military Governor of the Philippines while Douglas was a student at West Point, and the younger MacArthur would serve several tours of duty in that country over the next four decades, becoming friends with several influential Filipinos, including the country's future president, Emanuel L. Quezon. In 1935, he became Quezon's military advisor, a post he held after retiring from the U.S. Army and at the time of Japan's invasion of 1941. As Supreme Commander for the Southwest Pacific, MacArthur led American forces throughout the Pacific War. He officially accepted Japan's surrender in 1945 and would later oversee the Allied occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1951. He then led the UN Command in the Korean War from 1950 to 1951, until he was dismissed from his post by President Truman. In MacArthur in Asia, the distinguished Japanese historian Hiroshi Masuda offers a new perspective on the American icon, focusing on his experiences in the Philippines, Japan, and Korea and highlighting the importance of the general's staff-the famous "Bataan Boys" who served alongside MacArthur throughout the Asian arc of his career-to both MacArthur's and the region's history. First published to wide acclaim in Japanese in 2009 and translated into English for the first time, this book uses a wide range of sources-American and Japanese, official records and oral histories-to present a complex view of MacArthur, one that illuminates his military decisions during the Pacific campaign and his administration of the Japanese Occupation.

When Margaret Sanger returned to Europe in 1920, World War I had altered the social landscape as dramatically as it had the map of Europe. Population concerns, sexuality, venereal disease, and contraceptive use had entered public discussion, and Sanger's birth control message found receptive audiences around the world. This volume focuses on Sanger from her groundbreaking overseas advocacy during the interwar years through her postwar role in creating the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The documents reconstruct Sanger's dramatic birth control advocacy tours through early 1920s Germany, Japan, and China in the midst of significant government and religious opposition to her ideas. They also trace her tireless efforts to build a global movement through international conferences and tours. Letters, journal entries, writings, and other records reveal Sanger's contentious dealings with other activists, her correspondence with the likes of Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Sanger's own dramatic evolution from gritty grassroots activist to postwar power broker and diplomat.

Like many contemporary issues, moral discourse finds itself in the middle of a great divide. On one side of the chasm sits much of contemporary Western philosophy, moral psychology and the social sciences, which often view morality as a purely natural phenomenon. This view argues that human morality can be fully explained by appealing to naturalistic processes such as kin selection, reciprocal altruism, cultural evolution, and various models of social contract theory. In this context, God's e...

Nationalism appears to be rising in a renascent Asia and stoking tensions, aspirations, and identity politics while amplifying grievances and raising questions about prospects in what is touted as the Asian century. This book provides a broad overview and introduction to nationalism in Asia. Leading experts in their fields succinctly convey key information and critical analysis useful to students in a range of courses across disciplines. Part I presents thematic chapters, mostly cross-national studies, that elucidate the roots and consequences of nationalism in these societies and the varying challenges they confront. Part II presents concise country case studies in Asia, providing an overview of what is driving contemporary nationalism and surveys the domestic and international implications. Approaching Asia from the perspective of nationalism facilitates a comparative, interdisciplinary analysis that helps readers better understand each society and what the ramifications of nationalism are for contemporary Asians, and the worlds that they (and we) participate in. Asian Nationalisms Reconsidered is an invaluable textbook for undergraduate courses and graduate seminars related to international relations, Asian Studies, political science, government, foreign policy, peace and conflict, and nationalism.