![]() Predictably, the Japanese soon arrived and, in a matter of minutes, destroyed most of MacArthur’s air force.Ī few months later, he escaped to Australia, leaving his beleaguered forces on Bataan and Corregidor to suffer and die. Nine years later, in the critical moments immediately after Pearl Harbor, for reasons that have never been adequately explained, MacArthur kept his fleet of planes in the Philippines clustered wingtip to wingtip on the tarmac for hours, providing an astonishingly convenient target for the Japanese aerial attack that any other commander would have seen coming. In the process, one veteran was shot to death, and many wounded. MacArthur, convinced the gathering was all part of a vast communist conspiracy, drove the veterans out of the city, burned their shelters, and destroyed their belongings. In the summer of 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, MacArthur personally commanded a contingent of troops, accompanied by tanks, that trampled and teargassed thousands of unarmed World I veterans-the so-called Bonus Marchers-who’d gathered to peacefully protest in Washington, DC. ![]() In modern evaluations, more often than not, “Dugout Doug” comes up short. ![]() In recent years, however, historians have reassessed Douglas MacArthur-not just his command style, but particular decisions he made, and particular episodes from his long and controversial career. ![]()
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