MacArthur's War : Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero [Hardcover]

Stanley Weintraub (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 2000

Douglas MacArthur towers over twentieth-century American history. His fame is based chiefly on his World War II service in the Philippines. Yet Korea, America's forgotten war, was far more "MacArthur's War" -- and it remains one of our most brutal and frightening. In just three years thirty-five thousand Americans lost their lives -- more than three times the rate of losses in Vietnam. Korea, like Vietnam, was a breeding ground for the crimes of war. To this day, six thousand Americans remain MIA. It was Korea where American troops faced a Communist foe for the first time, as both China and the Soviet Union contributed troops to the North Korean cause. The war that nearly triggered the use of nuclear weapons reveals MacArthur at his most flamboyant, flawed, yet still, at times, brilliant.

Acclaimed historian Stanley Weintraub offers a thrilling blow-by-blow account of the key actions of the Korean War during the months of MacArthur's command. Our lack of preparedness for the invasion, our disastrous retreat to a corner of Korea, the daring landing at Inchon, the miscalculations in pursuing the enemy north, the headlong retreats from the Yalu River and Chosin Reservoir, and the clawing back to the 38th parallel, all can be blamed or credited to MacArthur. He was imperious, vain, blind to criticism, and so insubordinate that Truman was forced to fire him. Yet years later, the war would end where MacArthur had left it, at the border that still stands as one of history's last frontiers between communism and freedom.

MacArthur's War draws on extensive archival research, memoirs, and the latest findings from archives in the formerly communist world, to weave a rich tale in the voices of its participants. From MacArthur and his upper cadre, to feisty combat correspondent Maggie Higgins and her fellow journalists, to the grunts who bore the brunt of MacArthur's decisions, for good and ill, this is a harrowing account of modern warfare at its bloodiest. MacArthur's War is the gripping story of the Korean War and its soldiers -- and of the one soldier who dominated the rest.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Douglas MacArthur, in William Manchester's memorable phrase, was an American Caesar, a general accustomed to having his own way on or off the battlefield. He surrounded himself with fawning aides, commanded imperiously and sometimes impetuously, and did not kindly accept criticism.

Stanley Weintraub, who served as an Army lieutenant during the Korean War, makes the persuasive case that MacArthur's character and methods as commander of the Allied forces in Korea led him to commit disastrous errors of judgment--among them his failure to anticipate the Chinese entry into the war when MacArthur's troops approached the Yalu River, and his odd plan to seed South Korea's defensive perimeter with nuclear explosions and thus make the border impassable for generations.

Weintraub praises MacArthur's brilliance as a tactician and student of military history, pointing out that MacArthur's audacious landing at Inchon was straight out of Xenophon. He also notes that MacArthur correctly predicted that the Allied conduct of the Korean conflict would lead to stalemate. Still, Weintraub quietly insists that President Harry Truman was right in removing MacArthur from command on the grounds of insubordination, an act with enormous political repercussions at the time. An outstanding contribution to the literature of the Korean War--a conflict that is again in the news--Weintraub's book spares no detail in examining the end of Douglas MacArthur's checkered career. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Weintraub's popular military histories string together firsthand reportage and testimony to create compulsively readable, blow-by-blow accounts of key events. His latest covers the early Korean War, from June 1950 to April 1951, when Truman removed Douglas MacArthur from command. Journalistic accounts, memoirs, papers and previous histories let Weintraub cover the backroom, high-level maneuvering, the evolving public relations of the conflict and the dismaying and bloody facts on the ground. He narrates the first year-and-a-half of the peninsular "police action" along with all the related Cold War issues without which Korea would make no sense--among them debates about Formosa (Taiwan); slippery dealings between Stalin and Mao; and disputes over when, where and whether to use the Bomb. The superbly paced and detailed volume differs from Weintraub's previous works (like his account of Pearl Harbor, Long Day's Journey into War) in its clear focus and partisan stance: Weintraub's story line follows, and blames, MacArthur as the general tries both to escalate the war and to take responsibility for its conduct. Using dispatches and books by war reporters from Murrow to Keyes Beach and Marguerite Higgins, Weintraub creates a finely wrought sense of how the war looked as it was being fought: some readers will cherish this volume for that reason, while others will want more academic analysis--more views of institutions, theories and budgets. Analytically inclined readers may also quarrel with Weintraub's decision to cast MacArthur as bullheaded antihero. But even Weintraub's fiercest detractors (that is to say, MacArthur's defenders) will admit that he writes a densely gripping narrative, taking and defending with power and verve one position about the early Korean War. The volume also differs from Weintraub's other war books--as the foreword acknowledges--because it describes a war in which Weintraub fought: this one difference perhaps produced the rest.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1ST edition (May 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684834197
• ISBN-13: 978-0684834191
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,371,776 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Intriguing Book About a Mesmerizing & Enigmatic Subject!, June 15, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: MacArthur's War : Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero (Hardcover)

No other modern American military leader engenders such controversy and hotly-expressed differences in opinion than General Douglas MacArthur. Certainly, there can be no argument against the fact that his previous treatment by other authors such as William Manchester ("American Caesar") etc. does a much more comprehensive and objective service than does this book to anyone attempting to understand the man, his eccentricities, and his actions during the tenure of his fifty-year career as a virtual American military institution in the Orient. Yet, it should also be noted that this volume adds considerably to our understanding of MacArthur the man, the general, and the legend in an intriguing, unique, and somewhat different take on Macarthur, his character, vanity, conduct, and a blow-by-blow account of his prosecution of the Korean campaign.

At the outbreak of the Korean conflict MacArthur was preoccupied as the Governor-General of Japan with overseeing the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the defeated nation, and his first efforts to conduct the Korean campaign were through an attempt at long-distance management of the actions & ministrations of his field commanders. Of course, MacArthur couldn't stay out of the action long, & soon began actively interfering with command decisions from afar, and this led to a number of strains, breakdowns in communication, and military setbacks. The miscommunications and lack of clear and achievable military objective resulting from this situation soon turned into a both a political and military debacle, and according to Weintraub it was clear that MacArthur's fingerprints were all over the place in terms of poor planning, strategy, and tactics.

Moreover, given MacArthur's legendary self-absorption and his ego-driven association with Asian political potentates like national China's Chiang, his approach toward the military campaign in Korea often seemed less oriented to the stated and quite limited military goals of the Truman administration than it was an effort to achieve his own set of political objectives based on his own assessment of what the situation required, and these were possibly tied to his own aspirations for the 1952 Republican Presidential nomination, which he had reason to believe he could expect to come his way.

However, it should also be said that no one could lead a military action like MacArthur, and he was quite able, effective, and often brilliant in eventually pushing the Chinese back to the 38th Parallel. The problem was that he just would not yield to the chain of command, and through his campaign of sustained insubordination to President Truman forced his own recall and dismissal. Talk about being your own worst enemy!

In "MacArthur's War" author Weintraub treats us to a massively documented and carefully detailed yet quite readable and entirely entertaining view of the war in Korea. It is a blow-by-blow account of this, the bloodiest, fiercest, and most hotly contested military engagement since the Second World War. Told by way of the participants, and often in their own words, this is an engaging, entertaining, and scrupulously well-told history of a terrible conflict that cost 35,000 American lives and still, after almost fifty years, has over 6,000 American MIAs associated with it. This book should be read by anyone interested in military history, or with anyone who just loves a terrific story well told.

28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Weintraub writes well, Mac fairs not so well, June 3, 2000

By 

Brent Tomberlin - See all my reviews

This review is from: MacArthur's War : Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero (Hardcover)

I am a fan of MacArthur. I am interested in his life. I am interested in his faults and his successes. If Inchon was his best, the rest of Korea was probably his worst. The author does a great job of detailing the faults in generalship and character of this man. Weintraub does a fantastic job of intertwining the story of the generals and the politicians with the stories of how the "forgotten war" plays itself out for the American GI. The book was very well researched and documented. I am still a fan of the general. I understand more, however, what perhaps his private ambitions truly were and what motivated him. While Truman was a great president and thought MacArthur's speeches were a bunch of bull----; I think they are inspiring. For further reference on Korea and MacArthur, Geoffrey Peret's "Old Soldiers Never Die" does a fairly good job describing the challenges at the end of the general's life. Without Marshall, Truman clearly wouldn't have faired as well as he did. As a history teacher, I find that George C. Marshall is not given his just due in the history texts of our time. Weintraub tries to credit him and brings him into the picture well. Overall, the author does a fine job to bring this often skipped-over piece of American History to life. I would like to thank him for that and for reminding us that there was a war before vietnam, because a lot of students do not.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting new book for the 50th Anniversary of the war, June 20, 2000

By 

Charles R. Bowery Jr. (Bad Windsheim, Germany) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: MacArthur's War : Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero (Hardcover)

It is difficult to write history that appeals both to the academic and to the layman, but Weintraub does it quite well with this book. He deftly weaves vignettes describing MacArthur's eccentricities and megalomania with some rarely heard viewpoints of the early days of the war- the correspondents on the ground, for example. The narrative also contains (barely) enough detail on ground combat operations to keep the reader oriented. It's a small criticism, but I longed for more detailed description and analysis of Mac's ground commanders-- even though that isn't really the purpose of the book. I would recommend T.R. Fehrenbach's "This Kind of War" and Russell Geugler's "Combat Actions in Korea" for those interested in a combat narrative.

While I understand the author's reasoning for leaving out footnotes, I still would have appreciated at least endnotes for specific pieces of evidence.

This is an attractive, well- written book that adds to our understanding of MacArthur. Especially now, with the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the war approaching, it is refreshing to see new and challenging interpretations of the Korean War emerge. Recommended reading.