This is my assessment of Mac. Whatever his strengths or weaknesses, bringing greater glory to MacArthur was his one true goal and he would do whatever it took to get there. When he said, “I shall return” it was a statement that he would bend all his considerable power to to making that happen, no matter the proper strategy was for ending the war. He had to recover his kingdom and his glory from his own mistakes.
I don’t think Mac could have held the Philippines with the forces he had at the time but it isn’t like a Japanese attack was totally unexpected. The point of having such a large force there, and he did have a considerable army, was to resist aggression and Japan was clearly the likely attacker. We knew it was probably coming eventually. Mac just plan failed at his job, which was to be prepared for that attack. Giving him a medal of any kind after that was a mistake.
I do think his historical status as a military genius may may be overblown, but his stewardship of occupied Japan is perhaps the greatest feat of American statecraft in the 20th Century.
Yes, MacArthur does deserve credit for his good ideas. He did oversee the transformation of post-war Japan. He was one of the few major figures in the fifties who saw that Communism was not a monolith and argued that America should work on exploiting the rifts between the Soviet Union and other communist regimes like China, Yugoslavia, and North Korea. He also argued against American involvement in Vietnam.
Indeed. Notably, David Simmons, a knowledgeable and thoughtful poster, has since passed on.
Well, hrm. They’re not in a line between the US and Japan, but the plans for Operation Downfall list the Philippines as a “staging area.” [See lower left on this map].
But even before that, I’d call the Philippines strategically important in the general sense because they DO lie across the sea lanes between Japan and the oil-producing areas she had conquered and depended upon (especially Borneo and Cebu, IIRC). If one is anticipating a long war (as opposed to a very early invasion of Japan) there could be said to be strategic value in using the Philippines to inderdict the sea lanes.
I genuinely don’t know this…did MacArthur have anything to do with the atomic bombings?
I’m not sure who Curtis LeMay reported to at the time. I guess it could have been MacArthur, but I’d be surprised.
It was proposed to elevate MacArthur to five-star rank, and also to make him supreme commander of the invasion of Japan, but those things never quite materialized:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia on Operation Downfall] Planning
Responsibility for planning Operation Downfall fell to the U.S. commanders: Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Fleet Admirals Ernest King and William D. Leahy, and Generals of the Army George Marshall and Hap Arnold (the latter was commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces).[2] Douglas MacArthur at the time was also being considered for promotion to a special “super rank” of General of the Armies, so as to be granted operational authority over other five star officers.[3] However, the proposal to promote MacArthur was only at the level of informal discussion when World War II ended.
At the time, the development of the atomic bomb was a very closely guarded secret (not even then Vice President Harry Truman knew of its existence until he later became President), known only to a few top officials outside the Manhattan Project and the initial planning for the invasion of Japan did not take its existence into consideration. Once the atomic bomb became available, General Marshall envisioned using it, if sufficient numbers could be produced in time, to support the invasion.[4]
Throughout the Pacific War, the Allies were unable to agree on a single Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C). Allied command was divided into regions: by 1945, for example, Chester Nimitz was Allied C-in-C Pacific Ocean Areas, while Douglas MacArthur was Supreme Allied Commander, South West Pacific Area, and Admiral Louis Mountbatten was Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command. A unified command was deemed necessary for an invasion of Japan. Inter-service squabbling over who it should be (the US Navy wanted Nimitz, but the US Army wanted MacArthur) was so serious that it threatened to derail planning. Ultimately, the Navy partially conceded, and MacArthur was to have total command of all forces, if circumstances made it necessary.[5]
[/QUOTE]
The passage above makes it sound like MacArthur might not even have known about the bombs before they were used.
Can anyone show supporting evidence MacArthur deserves some form of credit for “commanding a nuclear attack?”
No. By WWII the MOH was awarded for extraordinary physical bravery and combat achievements. By WWII Dugout Doug was long past this point. He in fact retreated from the Philippines (the right thing to do) alone leaving his army behind. Odd to award the MOH for that. I imagine that he put himself in for the award and his toadies in Congress got it through without much opposition as he was not wildly unpopular in Congress at the time. MacArthur’s ego, like Patton’s, was enormous.
He did not. He even claimed that he was not even consulted. Here
It was not. LeMay reported to Hap Arnold. This was done in 1944 to keep the the valuable B-29s from being hijacked by [del]terrorists[/del] theater commanders who would want to utilize them for their own purposes. As outlined in Wiki:
Blah. Poorly written. The independence of the XX Bomber Command was created in 1944. LeMay was assigned later. Jan or Feb 1045, IIRC.
Correction: When LeMay was first assigned command, he reported directly to Arnold. Later, General Spaatz was command of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific based in Guam.
The order for the bombingwas transmitted to Spaatz from Thomas T. Hardy, Acting Chief of Staff, in Marshall’s absence.
Note that MacArthur and Nimitz were to be given a copy of the directive.
I’m not saying they were useless. I’m just saying the Philippines weren’t necessary and the resources used to liberate them would have been better used elsewhere.
For example, you can see from the map you linked to that while Luzon was identified as a staging area for Downfall, there are other staging areas that are closer to Japan and therefore better than Luzon. And there are other areas which interdict the same sea lanes. So the goals that were accomplished by liberating the Philippines would have been just as accomplished if the Philippines hadn’t been liberated.
The accepted military doctrine accepted by the JCS and the theater commanders was that invading Japan needed to be done in stages from the outer defensive line to the inner. Obviously they did not need to conquer all of the outer and inner lines but they needed to create breaks somewhere. The question they asked was Formosa or the Philippines. Nimitz and King were pushing for Formosa, which would have been even much more bloody and it was felt that the US didn’t have the necessary manpower.
Many historians agree with what Dissonance and I have said. That the Philippines was the better choice, but it was a waste to take the whole archipelago.
Are you arguing that the entire military US leadership was wrong and there was yet another option? You’ve got a map. It’s a simple matter of geography. Where should they have gone instead?
