MacArthur and Defeat in the Philippines

I have always found it interesting that historians are afraid to attack the MacArthur myth of invincibility. Much like Custer,MacArthur's reputation has only grown over the years into one of almost mythic status as the victor of the war in the Pacific and the battle of Inchon in the Korean War. The facts are that a 100,000 strong U.S.-Filipino Force fighting a defensive battle over difficult terrain was defeated by a Japanese force of 20,000 and MacArthur somehow came out a hero because of his thousands of communiques stating that millions of Japanese were swarming over his tiny band of ill-trained (due to him) troops. The funniest/strangest tidbit in the book regards that fact that MacArthur's HQ listed German pilots in Messerschmits attacking them because of course Japanese couldn't have built a proper attack plane much less fly it with their poor eye sight! The commander at Pearl Harbor wasn't a hero or the British commander at Singapore. Those men were castigated and in the case of the British commander interned. Should MacArthur have taken responsibility and allowed himself to be captured? A good question. FDR thought it would have been humiliating for the country and so the architect of the biggest US defeat ever? was saved. This book traces all of MacArthur's disasterous missteps that led to the U.S.'s terrible and in no way inevitable defeat. The fact that MacArthur left the islands with $500,000 of the locals money is sad and distasteful. Thank god Truman put this crazy, egomanic in his place when he did.

I found this work on McArthur the best objective opinion of this military "icon" written to date. It was appropriate and necessary for such a work to be written by an academic historian who was not an American in order to obtain an objective view of such a controversial man in American history. I would like to see the author write a similar analysis of McArthur's generalship in the Korean conflict. I think the author could have gained a more complete understand of the reduction of the Air Corps forces if he had reviewed the fine article by Richard Slater found in the November 1987 issue of Airpower Magazine.

This book makes an excellent contribution to a chapter of history that has been overlooked. Connaughton shows that the seeds of a possible US-Japan confrontation in the Philippines were sown decades earlier. Could it have been anticipated? MacArthur's career has many examples of his military brilliance and personal bravery which are at odds with his dismal performance in the Philippines between December 1941 and April 1942. MacArthur had five years to prepare for the defense of the Philippines and his strategic plan called for Japan to land troops at Lingayen, exactly where they did. Yet lack of co-ordination among his senior military commanders and the US Navy, together with sudden changes to long developed defense plans allowed the Japanese to land virtually unopposed, making defeat inevitable.It is intriguing to speculate how a successful defense, which should have been possible given the fact that the Japanese landed exactly where MacArthur expected them to, might have changed the course of World War II. MacArthur is fortunate that widespread US setbacks early in the war neccesitated a national hero and allowed him the opportunity to restore his reputation. Even today there are many people who cannot accept the idea that MacArthur made any mistakes, as other reviews of this book make clear. Perhaps another writer will one day tell us why MacArthur was so convinced that the Chinese would not attack across the Yalu during the Korean war. This mistake resulted in a massive setback for the UN forces and added years to that war.