Shogun and Strategist
American Caesar: Douglas Mac-Arthur 1880-1964.
by William Manchester.
Little, Brown. 793 pp. $15.00.
Douglas MacArthur rose to the top in the small army of the interwar years and then retired in 1934, after serving his full term as chief of staff. He then found employment as the organizer of the new army of the Philippines, and was its war commander in defeat. In 1942 he was recalled to active duty and placed in charge of the U.S. Far East Command; and when he had received Japan’s surrender in 1945, he became also the chief of the occupation. In 1950 he was appointed, in addition, UN commander-in-chief in Korea. A year later he was stripped of all his commands because he had challenged Truman’s authority over policy, and thus the principle of civilian control over the military.
As far as World War II is concerned, MacArthur is associated with Marshall, Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and so on in the military history we all remember. In our memory of the Korean war, MacArthur’s name evokes a daring landing at Inchon, a rapid advance to apparent victory, the sudden Chinese intervention, and then the bitter fighting which eventually ended with the restoration of the status quo ante at the 48th parallel. These memories and some recent entertainments, including a mediocre film, also remind us of Mac-Arthur’s ample and highly mannered speech, of his numerous vanities, and of his fatal political error in quarreling with the little haberdasher who was also a great President.
It is very hard to retrieve the true dimensions of the man from all this. But Douglas MacArthur was an altogether greater man than the other famous generals with whom his name is associated. The product of a blinkered West Point education, and of service in the extremely provincial small army of the interwar years, MacArthur entirely transcended his environment. There were very few men in his time or ours who had MacArthur’s true strategical understanding; still fewer were the American officers who understood as he did the modern forms of maneuver warfare; and there were only a handful of senior commanders who knew as well as MacArthur how to project an aura of leadership. Those who had one quality lacked the others. Patton, among a few others, had two of the three. Only MacArthur combined all of them. In addition, MacArthur’s ill-sounding phrases about “understanding the Oriental mind” should not obscure the plain evidence that he did exactly that, first in the Philippines, where he managed to combine an effective military overlordship with true respect for the embryonic independence of the pre-war “Commonwealth,” and then in occupied Japan, where he made alone every crucial decision, often against all advice, almost always being later proved to have been entirely right.
In retrospect, it seems scarcely credible that MacArthur should have been left in charge of defeated Japan without any real guidance from Washington. A lesser man might have hesitated before the vast scope of decisions left to him, but MacArthur seized the opportunity and acted much as a British viceroy in India might have done, before the telegraph. It was Mac-Arthur who decided that Hirohito should remain as a constitutional emperor while many were speaking of trial, execution, and a republic; it was MacArthur who decided to leave the Japanese government and civil service in place without a break, instead of pursuing reconstruction ab initio as in Germany; and it was MacArthur, the Republican right-winger, who imposed both land reform and unionization on Japan, and much else besides that many in America deemed “socialistic.” The full history of MacArthur’s occupation policy remains to be written, but it is plain that it was remarkably successful, and that it reflected a highly educated understanding of Japanese culture.
It is characteristic that the Japanese public understood his ambiguous role in Japan’s governance much better than most Americans, and no wonder, since MacArthur chose for himself a role carefully tailored to fit the familiar notion of the Shogun, whose real authority coexisted with the fiction of imperial rule. Neither dictator nor chief administrator, and certainly not in any real sense supreme military commander (as his title declared), MacArthur was in effective control through authority rather than power. American reporters had to resort to elaborate writing to define the exact nature of his post, but to the Japanese the matter was plain: MacArthur was the new Shogun, while the emperor had become once again what emperors had been until the fall of the Shogunate, a mere figurehead,
Very few men would have had the wisdom to choose such a perfectly well-cut role for themselves in such a delicate situation, and none could have played the part so well as he did, in a perfect blend of regal bearing and egalitarian pretense. His daily transit from home to office was a carefully contrived ceremony, a sort of motorized levee; but when, on the other hand, MacArthur chose one day to ride the elevator up to his office with a humble carpenter who happened to have stepped in before him, his retinue of PR men made quite sure that the incident was widely publicized. (The Japanese did not miss the point: a drama based on the episode had a successful run on the Tokyo stage.) In the politics of the occupation as in combat leadership, image-making and the presentation of the self were of the essence. In MacArthur’s case it is impossible and quite pointless to try to separate purposeful contrivance from mere vanity.
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It is particularly difficult to convey the nature of MacArthur’s military qualities. Warfare in an administrative style, with plodding tactics and elaborate logistics, based almost exclusively on the abundant use of sheer firepower, is the American norm. The officer is a manager, and the ideal type is the amiable mediocrity, efficient in routine procedures, rather than the true strategist or the brilliant tactician. A truly well-read and thorough student of military history, MacArthur rejected the norm and practiced a form of warfare entirely beyond the understanding of most of his colleagues. His was maneuver warfare, where the object is to muster highly focused strength against the weak points of an enemy rather than to attack his main strength in a direct contest of attrition. Maneuver is intellectually much more complicated than attrition warfare, and inherently much more risky, but then again it offers the chance of large and swift victories at a low cost in blood. Clark in the slow crawl up the Italian peninsula, Eisenhower in France after D-Day, both practiced attrition warfare; they took no chances and their armies paid in full—in blood, firepower, or both—for each step forward. MacArthur’s warfare avoided the confrontation of strength against strength; his operations in the Pacific from New Guinea to the end were all maneuver operations, characterized by rapid shifts of effort from place to place, in a constant search for the enemy’s weak points.
But it was the Inchon landing that exemplified maneuver warfare in its purest form. The North Koreans having advanced all the way south, so that the small U.S. and South Korean forces were confined to a small perimeter at the bottom of the peninsula, the standard American method would have been to accumulate massive reinforcements in the perimeter, and then launch a straightforward counteroffensive up the peninsula, to push the enemy back to the north, step by step, relying on sheer firepower in a series of head-on battles. Predictably, this was the unimaginative plan recommended by the Joint Chiefs and their staffs. Instead, less than three months from the outbreak of war, with only part of the potential reinforcement in hand, MacArthur left the weak perimeter at the southern end of the peninsula to its own devices and used the reinforcements sent him to effect an amphibious landing halfway up Korea, at Inchon near Seoul in the deep rear of the enemy.
Inchon was an important port close to the nodal point of enemy communications, and might well have been full of enemy troops; the coast is subject to extreme tides and has all the features that normally inhibit amphibious landings. To conventional minds this meant that one should not land at Inchon. To MacArthur the obvious unsuitability of the place was its main recommendation, since the enemy would not expect his forces to land there in defiance of the topography and of elementary military prudence. When told that it might simply be impossible to navigate the ships through the long and tortuous approach channel, and to find hard ground on which to land the troops (at low tide the soft mud stretches for miles), MacArthur characteristically pointed out that the Japanese had already landed troops at Inchon when fighting for Korea in 1894 and 1904. Equally characteristically, those who had not bothered to study the military history of the site were ready with their reply: it had been a Japanese landing, with small vessels, and therefore its lessons could be of no significance. Entirely on his own responsibility, at the high risk of a bloody debacle that would have utterly destroyed his career and reputation, MacArthur decided for Inchon. The outcome was the swift collapse of the North Korean offensive, which had lost its base of operations literally overnight. The fact that victory against North Korea merely resulted in a larger war with China has no bearing on the matter: the first war was truly won, and in one bold and brilliant stroke of a quality rare in the annals of war.
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Given the scope of the man’s achievements, it is very unfortunate that we lack a solid biography of Douglas MacArthur, and William Manchester’s very large book merely serves to remind us of our need. It is a shoddy compendium of facts great and little obtained from all the predictable sources. What must be the full store of remembered quotations is duly deployed, and Manchester has probably managed to retrieve every anecdote worthy of print, and many that could without loss have been left aside. Only the substance of a solid biographical study is missing, or is present only in very weak form. Manchester’s analysis of MacArthur’s military conduct reflects a fatal inability to comprehend things military, and his writing on MacArthur’s civilian endeavors, and notably the overlordship of Japan, does not represent an advance on the more thoughtful among the contemporary magazine articles. Instead of the depth that such a long book might easily contain, Manchester only gives us the little touches of authenticity characteristic of synthetic, knowing journalism (typically, he uses the transliterated Dai Nippon in lieu of plain “Japan”). The writing is pedestrian at best, where not downright vulgar. MacArthur deserves very much more.