Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Between Battles From to Douglas MacArthur served as the superintendent of West Point and instituted a variety of reforms intended to modernize the school. World War II. Recommended for you. MacArthur Gives Farewell Address. MacArthur Arrives in New Guinea.
General MacArthur Dismissed. Douglas Stephen A. George S. Omar N. Bradley Omar Nelson Bradley was one of the towering American military leaders of the first half of the 20th century.
Hirohito Hirohito was emperor of Japan from until his death in In pushing for a larger conflict, MacArthur downplayed the risk of inciting a massive war in Asia. General MacArthur did not think a ceasefire was an appropriate solution. The two men clashed. For Truman, the war represented an opportunity to stop the spread of communism into South Korea.
For MacArthur, the war was an opportunity to liberate the North from communist control, and aggressive action was required. This was not the first time the general had ignored direct orders from his Commander in Chief. Word of his firing spread quickly, and the American public found the news upsetting. During this time he was promoted to brigadier general of the Army and also married his first wife, Louise Cromwell Brooks.
For the rest of the s, MacArthur again held various military posts and also headed the American Olympic Committee. He divorced Louise in In , MacArthur was promoted to general and selected as the Army chief of staff.
Over the next few years his efforts were primarily devoted to maintaining a military that, like the rest of the country, was crippled by the Great Depression. He also spoke frequently of what he considered to be the increasingly serious threat of Communism, both in the United States and abroad. In , President Franklin D. Roosevelt chose MacArthur as his military adviser to the Philippines and sent him there to establish a defensive military force.
MacArthur married his second wife, Jean Faircloth, in , and the following year she gave birth to a son, Arthur. In July , MacArthur was recalled to active duty and became commander of U. In , at the end of the war, President Harry S. Truman appointed MacArthur supreme Allied commander. MacArthur was placed in charge of the formal surrender of Tokyo, and for the next six years, he remained in Japan to command the occupation forces there and to oversee the rebuilding of the country.
When the North Korean army invaded South Korea in , MacArthur was placed in command of the newly created United Nations forces and quickly drove back the attack.
So, inevitably, the mission crept. Here was a classic case of hubris and overreach: Having achieved a tremendous victory with the Inchon landing, MacArthur felt invincible.
He ordered his men to race headlong for the Yalu. The war would be over by Christmas, he said, and everyone could go home. How did MacArthur blunder so badly? How could he miss more than , Chinese soldiers?
Once the intelligence finally came in loud and clear, he and his staff of sycophants continued to dismiss it, suppress it, or willfully misinterpret its import. In so doing, they recklessly put tens of thousands of American and other United Nations troops in mortal danger. The result was catastrophic: One of the worst defeats, and one of the most ignominious withdrawals, in American military history.
It was, in some senses, a repeat of his debacle at Bataan. Only in this case, MacArthur had been outwitted and outflanked by a guerrilla army with no air force, crude logistics, and primitive communications, an army with no tanks and precious little artillery. All of this happened because MacArthur was almost criminally out of touch with reality. He had created a hermetic universe and a top-down structure that maintained a stubborn hostility to facts.
In Tokyo, he was busy running the occupation brilliantly, it must be said—playing emperor was a job for which he was perfectly suited. But in Korea, he was a classic absentee general—he never slept a single night on Korean soil during the whole conflict, and would only occasionally fly over from Japan for a quick photo-op or aerial reconnaissance.
So in November and December of , the men on the ground in Korea were left to claw their way out of the ordeal that MacArthur had created for them. Some of them, like the men of the First Marine Division, fought ferociously and with great ingenuity as they bashed their way out of the mountains around the Chosin Reservoir and marched to the safety of the sea—inflicting staggering casualties on the Chinese along the way.
But they never forgot the name of the man who put them in that tragic and unnecessary predicament, who never took responsibility for the fiasco, and who never thanked or apologized to them after they suffered and battled and froze across the barrens of North Korea on his behalf.
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