MacArthur's War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero

Weintraub is a serious scholar and a Korean vet. This book is credible because it matches the records as written down by the key players, such as George Marshall, Omar Bradley, Harry Truman, Eisenhower, and Samuel Morison.Weintraub shows that MacArthur was paralysed at Pearl Harbor. Marshall called him and gave him a string of emergency instructions. MacArthur performed none of them. Instead he sat on his bed and read the bible, The result? Clark Field was bombed and most of the B-17 Flying Fortresses were destroyed.When the Chinese surprised him in Korea, he panicked and wanted to get out completely. He sent a 38-page plan to the Joint Chiefs asking to get all troops and equipment out to Japan. He wanted Korea abandoned - another Dunkirk. Then Gen. O.P. Smith said, "Impossible. We don't have to lose this war. We can stay in Korea."MacArthur took a grand total of 13 photo-op trips to Korea, staying from 90 minutes to three or four hours at a time. He never spent a day or night in Korea. Instead, he ran the war from his headquarters in Tokyo, which he loved because it overlooked the Emperor's Palace.He thought America lost China because of politicians' incompetence. The truth is, Chiang Kai-shek's corruption and incompetence lost China. When he finally found Korea a useful tool in his presidential plans, he demanded atom bombs - to drop on Chinese civilians. When he was refused (by everyone around Truman, not just Truman himself), he accused Truman of betrayal.MacArthur messed up the war's initial stages, and then laid the blame on Truman, etc. It required Ridgway to clean up after MacArthur, but not before thousands of American lives lost.MacArthur's contempt of Truman was open. He kept his Commander-in-Chief waiting, and then did not salute him before shaking hands. Young officers on the scene took it all in, and could hardly believe their eyes. How could MacArthur expect his subordinates to obey him when he was so insubordinate himself? The memoirs of Gen. Bradley and Adm. Morison are particularly valuable for those who question Weintraub's assessment. I urge all to read their damning judgment of MacArthur.The Republicans who wanted to impeach Truman set up a congressional inquiry. Then to their shock and horror, every major player - from Marshall to Bradley and Acheson - supported the president fully and rebutted MacArthur's charges. The accuser had become the accused and deserved culprit.Why did the conservative National Review call MacArthur "the five-star peacock"? Why did the ultra-right-wing historian Paul Johnson refuse to defend MacArthur's conduct? The fact is, MacArthur was, and is, indefensible.MacArthur's long record of incompetence and insubordination went back to the days of Herbert Hoover, and beyond, when he fired murderously on protesting veterans in Washington. Then he later tried to disobey Rooselvelt, who had to shut him up with a Congressional Medal of Honour (surely the least deserved on record). This vain clown with his o

Douglas MacArthur will forever be remembered as one of America's outstanding generals. Nonetheless, every great warlord, if he survives long enough, has his twilight, and MACARTHUR'S WAR documents his - that period from June 1950 until April 1952 when his career and reputation became mired in the Korean War, the first of America's post-W.W.II Asian debacles.Author Stanley Weintraub's volume is a well researched, albeit dry, history of the general's last campaign. Within its pages, we encounter a wealth of players, both major and minor. MacArthur himself, America's aging postwar proconsul of a defeated Japan, sometimes brilliant, too often insubordinate, but always egotistical, self-aggrandizing, and militantly anticommunist. The staff toadies who surrounded him and sustained his narrow view of the universe, at the center of which was always Douglas himself: generals Wright, Willoughby and Whitney. His combat commanders: the hapless Gen. Walker (8th Army) and the self-important flunky Gen. Almond (X Corps). The wretched South Korean dictator, Syngman Rhee. General Peng Dehuai, the capable Chinese commander who infiltrated 200,000 of his troops into North Korea right under MacArthur's very nose. The plucky female war correspondent, Marguerite Higgins, who defied the clubbish, men-only mindset of her peers to go out and bring back the story. The home-front military and ex-military, in particular JCS Chairman Bradley and Defense Secretary Marshall, both so in awe of Douglas as to be rendered virtually ineffectual. Truman, the politically beleaguered Commander-In-Chief, who finally brought MacArthur to heel in a fit of righteous pique. And finally, MacArthur's eventual replacement as Supreme Commander, the humorlessly efficient Gen. Ridgeway.If your previous exposure to the Korean "police action" has been nothing more than "MASH" reruns, then you'll find this book to be a valuable introduction. It includes a center section of about 30 photos. Woefully, it includes only one map - a single page rendering of the entire Korean peninsula, which, more often than otherwise, doesn't even show the places where the action takes place. (The map is so extraordinarily useless, I wonder why the author bothered at all.)In the end, MacArthur was a victim of his own Weltanschauung, which became increasingly outmoded and dysfunctional as the Cold War swiftly monopolized the world stage. Had it not been for Korea, MacArthur's place on Mt. Olympus would certainly been assured. Instead, he died in relative obscurity in 1964 in the Waldorf-Astoria.

It is difficult to write history that appeals both to the academic and to the layman, but Weintraub does it quite well with this book. He deftly weaves vignettes describing MacArthur's eccentricities and megalomania with some rarely heard viewpoints of the early days of the war- the correspondents on the ground, for example. The narrative also contains (barely) enough detail on ground combat operations to keep the reader oriented. It's a small criticism, but I longed for more detailed description and analysis of Mac's ground commanders-- even though that isn't really the purpose of the book. I would recommend T.R. Fehrenbach's "This Kind of War" and Russell Geugler's "Combat Actions in Korea" for those interested in a combat narrative. While I understand the author's reasoning for leaving out footnotes, I still would have appreciated at least endnotes for specific pieces of evidence.This is an attractive, well- written book that adds to our understanding of MacArthur. Especially now, with the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the war approaching, it is refreshing to see new and challenging interpretations of the Korean War emerge. Recommended reading.

No other modern American military leader engenders such controversy and hotly-expressed differences in opinion than General Douglas MacArthur. Certainly, there can be no argument against the fact that his previous treatment by other authors such as William Manchester ("American Caesar") etc. does a much more comprehensive and objective service than does this book to anyone attempting to understand the man, his eccentricities, and his actions during the tenure of his fifty-year career as a virtual American military institution in the Orient. Yet, it should also be noted that this volume adds considerably to our understanding of MacArthur the man, the general, and the legend in an intriguing, unique, and somewhat different take on Macarthur, his character, vanity, conduct, and a blow-by-blow account of his prosecution of the Korean campaign. At the outbreak of the Korean conflict MacArthur was preoccupied as the Governor-General of Japan with overseeing the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the defeated nation, and his first efforts to conduct the Korean campaign were through an attempt at long-distance management of the actions & ministrations of his field commanders. Of course, MacArthur couldn't stay out of the action long, & soon began actively interfering with command decisions from afar, and this led to a number of strains, breakdowns in communication, and military setbacks. The miscommunications and lack of clear and achievable military objective resulting from this situation soon turned into a both a political and military debacle, and according to Weintraub it was clear that MacArthur's fingerprints were all over the place in terms of poor planning, strategy, and tactics. Moreover, given MacArthur's legendary self-absorption and his ego-driven association with Asian political potentates like national China's Chiang, his approach toward the military campaign in Korea often seemed less oriented to the stated and quite limited military goals of the Truman administration than it was an effort to achieve his own set of political objectives based on his own assessment of what the situation required, and these were possibly tied to his own aspirations for the 1952 Republican Presidential nomination, which he had reason to believe he could expect to come his way.However, it should also be said that no one could lead a military action like MacArthur, and he was quite able, effective, and often brilliant in eventually pushing the Chinese back to the 38th Parallel. The problem was that he just would not yield to the chain of command, and through his campaign of sustained insubordination to President Truman forced his own recall and dismissal. Talk about being your own worst enemy!In "MacArthur's War" author Weintraub treats us to a massively documented and carefully detailed yet quite readable and entirely entertaining view of the war in Korea. It is a blow-by-blow account of this, the bloodiest, fierce

MacArthur was one of the acclaimed heroes of the American military when I was growing up. Unfortunately, this idol had feet not merely of clay but of soggy mud. Weintraub magnificently documents his protagonist's arrogance, his megalomania, and his disdain for U.S. constitutional processes.Weintraub deftly points out that in MacArthur's efforts to become a public general, he wasn't even a particularly good general. The photo of MacArthur sitting happily on his command ship while American boys were invading at Inchon captures that mood perfectly. Weintraub has magnificently described the mud and muck of the Korean war, the valor of our soldiers particularly those in Task Force Smith and those who fought their way back from near the Manchurian border when the Chinese came in in force -- something that Mac assured President Truman would never happen.This is a splendid book which should be read by the public as well as the specialist. It is thoroughly researched, even the odd parts dealing with Mac's threat to use nuclear weapons. And it is disturbing in the way it paints a Congress ready to lionize a military man while denigrating the custodian of the Constitution who acted perfectly properly in relieving an insubordinate subordinate from high command. The country and the Army were both better off for Truman's actions.