Douglas MacArthur
The American general who rebuilt Japan as a democracy, saved South Korea with one brilliant landing, and was fired for refusing to accept that a president outranks a general.
Douglas MacArthur was the most gifted and least governable senior officer the United States produced in the twentieth century. He was born in 1880 to a Civil War general, graduated first in his West Point class, commanded a brigade in France at thirty-eight, and became Army chief of staff at fifty. He was also vain past the point of caricature, surrounded himself with staff who did not contradict him, and treated his own judgment as a national asset that civilians were lucky to have access to. Both halves of that description are necessary.
The Pacific
He was in the Philippines when Japan attacked in December 1941, lost his air force on the ground hours after Pearl Harbor, and was ordered out to Australia in March 1942 as his army collapsed toward surrender at Bataan. He arrived and announced I shall return, a phrase the War Department wanted changed to we and which he refused to alter.
The campaign that followed was genuinely his. Rather than assault every Japanese garrison, he leapfrogged them, taking lightly held positions with air cover and leaving hundreds of thousands of enemy troops stranded and irrelevant behind the advance. It was economical in American lives, which was not the general pattern of that war. He returned to the Philippines in October 1944 and took the Japanese surrender aboard USS Missouri on 2 September 1945.
Japan
The occupation is his real monument, and it is strange that a man of such spectacular ego ran it as well as he did. As Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers from 1945 to 1951 he governed Japan more or less by proclamation, and used the authority for a program no elected American government would have dared to legislate: a new constitution drafted by his own staff in a week and adopted in 1947, complete with the renunciation of war in Article 9; votes for women; the legalization of unions; the breakup of the zaibatsu conglomerates; and a land reform that transferred farmland from landlords to tenants and destroyed the rural social order that had underwritten militarism.
He also made the decision that shaped postwar Japan more than any other: to keep Emperor Hirohito on the throne and shield him from prosecution, on the judgment that occupying Japan without him would require far more troops for far longer. It worked, and it left the question of imperial responsibility unresolved for the next eighty years.
Korea
When North Korea invaded in June 1950 and drove the defenders into a corner around Pusan, MacArthur proposed an amphibious landing at Inchon, far up the west coast behind the enemy: extreme tides, a seawall instead of a beach, a defended city as the objective. Almost every planner opposed it. He was right. The landing on 15 September 1950 cut the North Korean army's supply line and collapsed the front within weeks.
Then he kept going. Advancing toward the Yalu, he dismissed Chinese warnings as bluff, split his forces on either side of a mountain range, and assured Washington that Beijing would not intervene. In late November roughly 300,000 Chinese troops attacked, and the United Nations command was thrown back down the peninsula in the longest retreat in American military history.
Rather than accept a limited war, he publicly pressed for bombing Chinese territory and using Nationalist troops, and wrote to a congressional leader that there is no substitute for victory. Truman relieved him on 11 April 1951.
The echo
He came home to ticker tape and a joint session of Congress, where he closed with the line about old soldiers never dying but only fading away. Public opinion was overwhelmingly on his side. It did not matter, and that is the point. In the Senate hearings that followed, General Omar Bradley destroyed the case by observing that MacArthur's strategy would have taken the United States into the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.
MacArthur is now taught as the standing American case in civil-military relations. A democracy needs generals bold enough to attempt Inchon, and it cannot survive generals who believe that being right about Inchon entitles them to make foreign policy. Truman's decision, deeply unpopular at the time, is the reason the boundary has held since.