Defending MacArthur

I take exception to Richard Frank’s “The MacArthur No One Knew” (September 2007), complaining of MacArthur’s “deft cribbing of the ideas of others.” It is the duty of a commander to get ideas from his staff and to pick what he considers the best. The results are what count, and this marks the great commanders. It is not the duty of the commander to reveal the source of the ideas either to the press or to the enemy.

Right or wrong, MacArthur was a national hero at a time when we were desperately in need of one. I think that this attack, sixty years after the event, was a cheap shot.

John K. Skelton
Wolfeboro, N.H.

MacArthur could use some real criticism for his real faults, but he was hardly the only general officer of his age who used self-aggrandizement in promoting his career and theater of war. Here is a partial list of others who did the same thing: Montgomery, de Gaulle, Clark, Patton, Sims, Auckenlick, Alexander, Halsey, Harris, and Tedder.

William H. Bacharach
Pequea, Pa.

I came ashore on Leyte in early March 1945 (almost missed the war). Driving down the beach road to the 96th Infantry Headquarters I spotted a strange pyramid made of concrete and stone that obviously used to have a plaque on it. A local GI told me it was a monument to where MacArthur had come ashore in October 1944. I asked what had become of the plaque. “Oh, the GIs tore it off and threw it in the ocean,” he replied. Apparently “I shall return” didn’t sit too well with the Battle of Leyte GIs.

Lloyd M. Pierson
Moab, Utah

Richard B. Frank replies:

I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Bacharach that MacArthur was not the only uniformed leader in World War II who engaged in self-aggrandizement—nor were the civilians innocent of such practices. MacArthur surpassed others by degree, not kind. He conducted a singularly relentless campaign to link his name with the concept and execution of every facet of his campaigns and he only grudgingly allowed the slightest public recognition of the contributions of others. I have no knowledge of the story of the alleged vandalizing of a monument to MacArthur on Leyte, but even MacArthur’s admirers noted the distaste many GIs expressed for MacArthur due to his self-promotion.

I also agree emphatically with Mr. Skelton that other leaders have achieved acclaim by following plans conceived by subordinate staff officers or commanders without acknowledgment. What I tried to emphasize was that the actual pattern undergirding a majority of MacArthur’s greatest achievements of adaptation rather than innovation was the reverse of his carefully cultivated public image. The great irony of this is that I believe the pattern of adaptation forms a more useable and enduring template for achieving military success than the false image of singular military “genius.” Mr. Skelton will also find my work expresses distaste for MacArthur’s shameless self-promotion in his communiqués in the first Philippine campaign, but it also rebuts efforts to debunk the substantive basis for MacArthur’s rise to the status of national hero in 1942.

Don’t Pass Kinkaid By

Richard Frank correctly points out that MacArthur adopted his bypassing tactic in New Guinea in 1944 only after Admiral Halsey had introduced that practice in the Solomons in August 1943. Actually, bypassing had been introduced even earlier, in May 1943, when forces under Adm. Thomas Kinkaid invaded Attu in the Aleutians, purposely bypassing the heavily defended island of Kiska. And even before that, in the spring of 1942, the Japanese had bypassed besieged Bataan and Corregidor by leaving only a weak containing force there and shifting their main units further south to speed their invasion of the Netherlands Indies. Bypassing, as MacArthur himself later wrote, was “as old as warfare itself.”

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