Hey guys,
I saw a documentry on the history channel the other week about MacArthur, he was some hot stuff in New Guinea and the solomons, I was wondering if anyone else saw the film.
No wonder those Japanese retreated the counter attack at Guadloupe was full on, by all accounts.
This forum looks real good, i have been lurking for a while,
and you brits sure are funny, sorry to hear about yo’ dawg IRONMAN I hate to see another American suffer!
praise be. JT
MacArthur did very well in the WWII Pacific, it’s just that he seemed to lose it a bit in Korea which rather ruins his mystique.
Dont think it ruins his mystique. I think he just wasnt used to hearing “no” He was a 5 Star General not a politican. Very different from others like “Ike” for instance.
Hmm, you’ve got a point there although I do think that his plan for deploying nuclear weapons was a little detached from reality and he does seem to have gone out of his way to provoke the Chinese. A good general should know when to stop as well as when to keep going.
I beg to differ. He was very much so a politician. Every move he had done in the Pacific Campaign were politically motivated. Some of them include:
Did you know he was working for a presidential nomination until the wrong kind of people (the extreme-right reactionaries) showed support for him?
Wading ashore at Leyte. There was absolutely no need for him to wade ashore at Leyte, except he knew he had a photographer on hand, so he chose to do so for the publicity.
The complete censorship of everything in his theater. All words about MacArthur must be good news, otherwise they are censored. All credits for victories went for MacArthur instead of the respective field commanders.
As SCAP, he brilliantly fought off the pressure to try Hirohito as a war prisoner, allowing him to occupy Japan with nearly total Japanese support.
Did you know he wrote just about all of the Japanese constitution?
There were too many incidences. Some perhaps out of his megalomania alone, but most are politically charged. As controversial as he was, he was doubtlessly a great politician in his own right.
If you are interested in MacArthur, I strongly recommend reading William Manchester’s American Caesar.
McArtur may well have been a qusi megolomaniac with an ego the size of a house but Japan in particular owes him a debt in enabeling it to become a democratic nation and go on to being the techionological power house of the last 40 odd years.
mac arthur was great!,*my favourite american general (*vs the general patton,another military genius).
I think you have chosen to idolize two of the most eccentric American generals in history 
RIGHT ON MAN! I back u 110% on that statement 
Are you sure you agree or just agree with the fame that both those generals recieve get even today. There are a lot more unknown commaders that did more but were never as praised as those two.
In only my personal opinion Mac performed poorly when the chips were down and only later somewhat vindicated himself when the tide had turned and he had overwhelming superiority. :roll:
Well I might agree with that. But you have to admit that he was good. The invasion of Inchon during the Korean war was absolutely brillant and saved the S. Koreans asses
wasn’t there debate about him knowing of the attack on the phillipens and did nothing about it?
MacArthur was overrated, and often took credit for his subordinates work…
First off, no Australian of my generation is anything other than grateful for the efforts in the pacific war by the USA.
In my reading of it, I wouldn’t give the US Army’s ground forces much of the credit, until the return to the Philippines.
A political general, and a hubris infected megalomaniac? You betcha arse. Everything said on this front in this thread above is true.
He may have been a brave man in ww1, but there is almost no evidence that he was in wwII. And he couldn’t obey orders. The most valuable thing he ever did was to decide on the Garand.
Everything that came out of his HQ, from 1942 on, was predicated on the next Presidential election!
He was known to the Australian troops as ‘Dugout Doug’, and was renowned for avoiding the front line. And thus he ended up not having a clue about the realities, horrificly so in PNG.
The US’s soldiers, and leadership, and thus Mac, did NOT perform well in PNG, not at all. Took them a long time to get any better.
G’warn read up about it. Might do you good.
Buna, Gona and Lae, ?? look them up!!
where the already exhausted Aussie soldiers, with Battalions below coy strength - who had fought their way across PNG via the Owen Stanley’s, and didn’t land - like the fresh Yank division’s - within a few miles of the places above, did most of the fighting. ALLIED victories? I don’t think so. Apart from logistics, that is.
The vast majority of the fighting on the ground in PNG - right to the end - was carried out by the Australians, news which still hasn’t reached the USA it seems.
“allied troops” being the required newsspeak* from Mac’s hq.
It was Australian infantry that broke the ‘invincible’ Japanese soldiery. NOT Dougie, or yr GI’s, and well before Guadalcanal even began. Do try to get your heads around this.
One of the things that most puzzle me, and many other Aussies, is this adulation of Mac and Patton, two of the least admirable human beings I’ve ever studied, and only one of them a truly successful general.
Warmest,
Timbo
Well Timbo, I am inclined to agree with the gist of your statement. There were many political Commanders, I remamber reading about Mark Clark in Italy and any news had to be preceeded by the words ‘With General Clarks’s Army’ or something like it.
One of the things that most puzzle me, and many other Aussies, is this adulation of Mac and Patton, two of the least admirable human beings I’ve ever studied, and only one of them a truly successful general.
Which one though?
Patton, who continued to perform well, in WWII!
I have a bit of a problem with these statements. You make it sound as though the Australian Army somehow single-handedly broke, or exposed the weaknesses of, the Imperial Japanese Army. And BTW, I have nothing but the utmost respect for the Australian soldier, as being amongst the toughest, fiercest Allied troops of WWII. But, there were U.S. Marines at Wake Island as well as U.S. soldiers in the Philippines/Bataan that fought the Japanese to a standstill and inflicted heavy casualties, although in both cases they surrendered; but they only did so only after blooding the Japanese infantry and exposing them for what they were: fanatically brave and clever on the one hand, but also as “dangerous amateurs” --using outmoded offensive tactics and weapons, which made them terribly ineffective against a modern army in an open area permitting armored maneuver, or on the attack against fortified positions. The U.S. and Filipino Armies surrendered after they were cut off and exhausted most of their food and ammo. If the U.S. Navy had decided to take a very big risk, and had successfully relieved them by breaking the Japanese fleet blockade, they could have held out indefinitely.
But in fact, the Marines on Wake Island only surrendered AFTER THEY WERE WINNING and had successfully repelled the Japanese landings in one of the few times in history the defender repelled an amphibious assault! The Marine commander, in a horrendous mistake, believed his forces had been overrun because his communications were cut, and all he could see from his CP was Japanese flags flying all over the island (and a lot of Japanese corpes, which he couldn’t see).
And I’m no fan of Gen. MacArthur. He was way overrated, pompous, imperious, schemingly political, and treated his immediate subordinates as if they were his personal pets. But, I’m not sure what you mean as far as Patton. I haven’t read on him extensively, but I’ve never heard anything too negative, other than he was very stubborn and old fashioned in a sense, despite being one of the few Allied generals to see the full potential of armor.
And he realised he’d alienated, or risked alienating, some of his own support base by playing the reluctant candidate while trying to curry favour with his opponents in some of the most embarrassing correspondence ever written in the period.
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He actually waded ashore twice, the first time having been missed by his spin doctors who realised the great photo opportunity and did it again, resulting in the famous picture.
The best example of which is when he sent Gen. Eichelberger into the north Papuan campaign to rally the failed US troops at Buna and told Eichelberger to die there but if he won Mac would publish his name, as if this was some kind of immortal recognition of military skill. See Eichelberger’s “Our Jungle Road to Tokyo”. It shows how Mac valued publicity, but failed to understand that better men put no value in it.
I think you’re agreeing with my understanding that this was a clever move, emanating from Mac’s Asian experience and understanding, which enabled him to govern Japan when the alternative might have been ungovernable. The fact remains that Hirohito was a nasty littlle war criminal at the top of the tree but, like sundry others such as the Harbin crew he escaped what he deserved while others of lesser responsibility were tried.
Definitely. It gives the lie to many of the bad and good things said about Mac. I think Manchester, who fought in the Pacific and who recounted his own experiences in the semi-factual “Goodbye Darkness”, is a pretty fair biographer of Mac but perhaps not the most objective or best informed on various details.
This ignores many great US ground force (I’m assuming ‘ground force’ includes USMC) successes from Guadalcanal to the various combined operations in PNG.
There is a lot of evidence to the contrary. The man was a self-seeking, self-promoting, devious, lying skunk in many respects, but it is well-documented that, unlike many commanders of equal status, he went forward on a number of occasions in the SWPA campaign and exposed himself to enemy fire which he disregarded in the best traditions of leading from the front.
I think you will find that most of it in that period was directed to establishing and consolidating his position as SWPA commander, with designs upon being appointed commander of everything west of California, trying to wrest control from the USN. The naked presidential political ambitions emerged later.
See my earlier comment on his alleged cowardice. The 'Dugout Doug" title was actually conferred by US troops. As for lack of knowledge about the realities in PNG, he was right up there with his land commander, the Australian Gen Thomas Blamey. Neither of them had a clue about what their troops faced in PNG and both of them were political shits of the first order who could be relied upon to sacrifice their subordinate commanders to save their own skins. And both of whom did.
This is unfair to US troops in PNG. The biggest failure and biggest problem they faced was early on at Buna. The main problems there were poor training, poor equipment, poor supply, and poor leadership. The National Guard 32nd Division failed spectacularly at Buna for all those reasons, not because of any inherent deficiency in American men. They weren’t any worse than the Australian 53rd Bn which failed on Kokoda. The main reason the Australian 39th Bn did so well on Kokoda is that its poorly trained ranks were reinforced with a good spread of battle-hardened 2nd AIF officers and NCO’s who were the backbone of its ability and resistance. The 53rd Bn had a much lower rate of AIF reinforcements and performed much worse. The US National Guard 32nd Division, who were semi-trained militia like the 39th and 53rd Bns, didn’t have any officers or NCO’s with the same experience as the 39th Bn or the later AIF units which finally won Kokoda after getting a flogging by the Japanese. While the Australian 39th Bn performance on Kokoda is a great military feat (as is the Japanese advance), it is always ignored that Gen Eichelberger achieved an even greater feat in being put in command of the largely useless 32nd division (which is about ten times a bigger problem in size in rifle companies than a battalion like the 39th Bn and maybe a hundred or several hundred times bigger in overall issues) and, in the field in a very short time, converted some of them by outstanding leadership into a useful fighting force.
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Milne Bay was, as Field Marshal Slim noted, a huge morale booster after the run of Japanese victories as it was the first time that a Japanese landing force had landed, been defeated, and the survivors had been forced to evacuate, which is different to the first Wake Island event where the inferior US forces repulsed an attempted landing by some outstanding gunnery which discouraged the naval force from proceeding with the attempted landing.
Guadalcanal was actually raging while the Papuan campaign was running. It was fought by the USMC under POA American naval command rather than the Papuan fighting by, largely, Australian militia SWPA army command. Leaving aside the vigorous turf battles between Mac and Admiral King / Washington / Gen Marshall etc which expended more energy by Mac and his opponents than they ever devoted to fighting the Japanese, the fact is that the Americans actually won on Guadalcanal and were the first to expel the Japanese from a geographically distinct territory, although about a month after the primarily Australian victory at Buna - Gona -Sanananda in Papua… Meanwhile the Australians, with various levels of American support, fought on in PNG for the rest of the war without ever expelling the Japanese. On the other hand, PNG tied up maybe 400,000 Japanese troops and killed maybe two thirds of them during the war, for which Mac and the other Americans should be bloody grateful they didn’t‘ have to confront on their way to Japan but they probably wouldn‘t have had to confront them as Japanese shipping tonnage went down dramatically during the war, not least because of US and Dutch submarine action which were based in Australia, so Japan wouldn’t have been able to move them elsewhere ………… in the end, it was all part of the same effort.