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MacArthurs ribbon
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Mexican War, WW1, WW2,
Korea |
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"You couldn't shrug
your shoulders at Douglas MacArthur," observes historian David
McCullough. "There was nothing bland about him, nothing passive
about him, nothing dull about him. There's no question about his
patriotism, there's no question about his courage, and there's no
question, it seems to me, about his importance as one of the
protagonists of the 20th century."
Douglas MacArthur lived his entire life, from cradle to grave, in the
United States Army. He spent his early years in remote sections of New
Mexico, where his father, Arthur MacArthur Jr., commanded an infantry
company charged with protecting settlers and railroad workers from the
Indian "menace." As a teenager, Arthur had served with
distinction in the Union Army, eventually earning the Congressional
Medal of Honor for leading a courageous assault up Missionary Ridge in
Tennessee. But he soon discovered that life in the post-Civil War U.S.
Army held little of the glamour he knew during the war. These years were
even harder for Douglas' mother, Mary Pinkney Hardy MacArthur, whose
upbringing as a proper Southern lady had done little to prepare her for
raising a family on dusty western outposts. But seen through a boy's
eyes, life at a place like Ft. Selden, New Mexico, was heady stuff.
"My first memory was the sound of bugles," Douglas MacArthur
recalled in his "Reminiscences." "It was here I learned
to ride and shoot even before I could read or write -- indeed, almost
before I could walk or talk." Even more importantly, by watching
his father and listening to his mother, he learned that a MacArthur is
always in charge.
When Douglas was six, Captain MacArthur was assigned to Ft. Leavenworth,
Kansas, where "Pinky," as his mother was known, could finally
introduce him and his older brother Arthur to life back in
"civilization." Three years later the family took another step
in that direction when they moved to Washington, D.C., where Arthur took
a post in the War Department. During these formative years, Douglas was
able to spend time with his grandfather, Judge Arthur MacArthur, a man
of considerable accomplishment and charm. As his grandfather entertained
Washington's elite, Douglas learned another valuable lesson: a MacArthur
is a scholar and a gentleman.
Douglas, who had always been an unremarkable student, first started to
reveal his own intellectual gifts when his father was posted to San
Antonio, Texas, in 1893. There he attended the West Texas Military
Academy, thriving in an atmosphere which combined academics, religion,
military discipline and Victorian social graces. By virtue of his
excellent record there, his family's political connections and top
scores on the qualifying exam, Douglas received an appointment to the
United States Military Academy at West Point in 1898. Over the next four
years, he would achieve one of the finest records in Academy history.
General Arthur MacArthur -- back from the Philippines, where he had
helped defeat the Spanish and served as military governor -- looked on
proudly as his son graduated first in the class of 1903.
What became a lasting connection with the Philippines began with
Douglas' first assignment out of West Point, when the young Lieutenant
sailed to the islands to work with a corps of engineers. While on a
surveying mission there, he recalled being "waylaid on a narrow
jungle trail by two desperados, one on each side." MacArthur
responded without hesitation. "Like all frontiersmen, I was expert
with a pistol. I dropped them both dead in their tracks, but not before
one had blazed at me with an antiquated rifle." Soon after this
first brush with physical danger, MacArthur enjoyed excitement of a
different kind, when he was assigned to accompany his father on an
extended tour through Asia, where the General would review the military
forces of eleven countries. The MacArthurs, Pinky included, were treated
like royalty, and Douglas came away from the trip firmly convinced that
America's future -- and his own -- lay in Asia.
One of Douglas's next assignments included service as an aide in
Theodore Roosevelt's White House. But when he found himself in a tedious
engineering assignment in Milwaukee in 1907, his performance dropped and
he received a poor evaluation. To add to his confusion, he had fallen in
love with a New York debutante named Fanniebelle, and his brilliant
career prospects seemed to wane. But Douglas made amends in his next
assignment, at the staff college at Leavenworth, and when his father
died in 1912 he was transferred to the War Department in Washington, so
that he could care for his mother. While there he was taken under the
wing of Chief of Staff Leonard Wood, a protégé of his father, and his
career was again firmly on track. In 1915 MacArthur was promoted to
major and the following year became the Army's first public relations
officer, performing so well that he is largely credited with selling the
American people on the Selective Service Act of 1917, as the country
moved ever closer to joining the war in Europe.
Even though his record to that point had been excellent, the First World
War gave Douglas MacArthur his first real measure of fame. Quickly
promoted to brigadier general, he helped lead the Rainbow Division --
which he had helped create out of National Guard units before the war --
through the thick of the fighting in France. With a flamboyant, romantic
style matched only by real feats of courage on the battlefield,
MacArthur became the most decorated American soldier of the war.
While his peers were demoted to their pre-war ranks, MacArthur kept his
through a plum new assignment as Superintendent of West Point. Although
he antagonized many of the old guard, MacArthur made good on his mandate
to drag the moribund Academy into the 20th century, enabling it to
produce officers fit to lead the country in the type of modern war he
had just experienced first hand. He also managed to get married -- to
Louise Cromwell Brooks, a vivacious flapper and heiress very different
from her spit-and-polish second husband. A minor scandal erupted when
Chief of Staff John J. Pershing -- with whom Louise had had an affair
during the war -- shipped MacArthur from West Point to a makeshift
assignment in the Philippines. Although disappointed, MacArthur was glad
to be back in his beloved islands; Louise, used to the glamorous society
of cities like New York and Paris, was not pleased. Even after their
return to the States in 1925, the marriage continued to deteriorate.
Louise filed for divorce in 1928. Once again, MacArthur found solace in
the Philippines, where he took command of the Army's Philippine
Department and renewed a friendship with the island's leading
politician, Manuel Quezon, whom he had known since 1903.
Although he and Quezon failed in their bid to have MacArthur named
governor of the Philippines, President Hoover helped take the sting out
of it by naming MacArthur to the Army's top job, Chief of Staff, in
1930. But the early '30s were a trying time to be Chief, when the Great
Depression made Americans deaf to MacArthur's warnings about the rising
tide of world fascism. Despite his able leadership, the Army fell to
all-time lows in strength under his watch. This, along with the damage
to his reputation from the Bonus March of 1932, when he very visibly led
army troops in routing impoverished World War I vets from the capital,
made MacArthur receptive to other opportunities. Once again, he was
drawn to the Philippines. In 1935, his old friend Quezon, President of
the newly created Philippine Commonwealth, invited him to return to
Manila as head of a U.S. military mission charged with preparing the
islands for full independence in 1946.
The next few years were among the happiest in MacArthur's life. On his
way to Manila, he met and fell in love with 37-year-old Jean Marie
Faircloth from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. When Pinky died shortly after
their arrival in Manila, Jean helped fill the void, and her devotion
would remain a source of strength for the rest of his life. After the
birth of their son, Arthur MacArthur IV, the 58-year-old general proved
a doting father. But their blissful life in Manila was slowly
overshadowed by the growing threat posed by an expansionist Japan.
MacArthur, despite the able assistance of top aide Dwight Eisenhower,
would not have enough time or money to build a force capable of
resisting the Japanese. When war finally came with the blow at Pearl
Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Philippines was doomed: MacArthur's air
force was quickly destroyed, his army shredded, and by January his
forces had retreated to the Bataan peninsula, where they struggled to
survive. From his command post on the island of Corregidor at the mouth
of Manila Bay, MacArthur watched his world fall apart.
But despite MacArthur's poor showing in the Philippines, President
Roosevelt knew he couldn't let America's most famous general fall to the
enemy, and ordered him to withdraw to Australia. Although it ran counter
to his notion of a soldier's duty, MacArthur left his men facing sure
destruction, comforted only by the belief that he might lead an army
back to rescue them. For the next three years, the world watched as his
personal quest -- "I shall return" -- became almost synonymous
with the war in the Pacific. Although MacArthur's path through the dense
jungles of New Guinea was hardly imagined in the initial war plans, his
singleminded drive and resourcefulness made it one of the two prongs in
the Allied drive to roll back the Japanese. Simultaneously fighting a
two front war -- one with the Japanese, the other with the U.S. Navy,
who understandably saw the Pacific as theirs -- MacArthur slowly gained
momentum. In October of 1944 the world watched as he dramatically waded
ashore at Leyte, and in the following months liberated the rest of the
Philippines. On September 2, 1945, he presided over the Japanese
surrender on board the "U.S.S. Missouri," bringing an end to
World War II.
His place as a leading figure of the 20th century already secure,
MacArthur may have made his greatest contribution to history in the next
five and a half years, as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in
Japan. While initiating some policies and merely implementing others, by
force of personality MacArthur became synonymous with the highly
successful occupation. His GHQ staff helped a devastated Japan rebuild
itself, institute a democratic government, and chart a course that has
made it one of the world's leading industrial powers. Yet by the late
1940s, MacArthur was increasingly bypassed by Washington, and it seemed
his remarkable career might be over.
But in June of 1950, the sudden outbreak of the Korean War --
"Mars' last gift to an old warrior" -- thrust MacArthur back
into the limelight. Placed in command of an American-led coalition of
United Nations forces, MacArthur reversed the dire military situation in
the early months of the war with a brillian amphibious assault behind
North Korean lines at the Port of Inchon. But within weeks of this great
triumph he and Washington miscalculated badly. MacArthur's approach to
the Chinese border triggered the entry of Mao's Communist Chinese, and
as 1951 dawned, they faced what he called "an entirely new
war." Although the able leadership of General Matthew B. Ridgway
stabilized the military situation near the pre-war boundary at the 38th
parallel, MacArthur's months of public and private bickering with the
Truman administration soon came to a head. On April 11, 1951, the
President relieved General MacArthur, triggering a firestorm of protest
over our strategy not only in Korea, but in the Cold War as a whole. As
the last great general of World War II to come home, MacArthur received
a hero's welcome. Despite his dramatic televised address to a joint
session of Congress, however, the issue died quickly, and with it any
hopes MacArthur had of reaching the White House in 1952.
True to his word, the old soldier "faded away" from the public
eye, living quietly in New York until his death in 1964. While it's
questionable whether his storied life ever brought him complete
satisfaction, one thing is clear: Douglas MacArthur had more than
fulfilled his self-imposed destiny of becoming one of history's great
men.
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