General MacArthur’s Disaster in Korea
How optimism, an obsession with publicity and brash decision making lost the war
From 1945 until the outbreak of the war in Korea in 1950, General Douglas MacArthur had been ruling from Japan and overseeing the Allied occupation of Japanese territory. During that time period he had built himself a network of intelligence agents, sycophants, trusted advisors and Japanese locals who propped up his regime from Tokyo.
MacArthur was still revered as a top rate military hero. He was an instrumental figure who helped the USA win World War II. He had shown a knack for battlefield intuition and had a magnetic personality that everyone gravitated towards. All of those things transformed Douglas MacArthur from a scrappy underdog commander to a political figurehead who became more obsessed with image than sound military doctrine.
Far from the long arm of Washington
Tokyo is a long way from Washington DC. That is true today and it was doubly true in the 1940s. The president rarely traveled abroad in those days, news traveled by telegraph cable and MacArthur spent years…
