Army Generals

choi

(1) Brendan Simms, An Apocalypse of Empires; As rising powers sought to establish colonial nations,  the world was consumed by war. Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2025, at page C7
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... of-empires-39afc71a
(book review on Paul Thomas Chamberlin, Scorched Earth; A global history of World War II. Basic, 2025)

(a) Excerpt in the window of print: "Early Nazi victories encouraged Japanese ambitions. Am attack on a Pacific naval base led to Americans joining the fight.

(b) Quote:

(i) the first five paragraphs: "All of the main actors in World War II were, as Paul Thomas Chamberlin notes in 'Scorched Earth,' empires of one sort or another. 'For centuries,' the author writes, 'the ability to project power across vast distances and over foreign peoples had represented a key component of national power. Empires dominated the international order and remained the central players on the world stage' even after the catastrophe of World War I. There were the self-described British, French (until 1940 anyway), German and Japanese empires. Then there was the Soviet Union, which may have conceived of itself as anti-imperialist but was the heir to the multinational Czarist empire and brutally suppressed any aspirations toward independence in its individual regions. The US, which also considered itself as anti-colonial, was a more complicated case, but it, too, had various overseas possessions and dependencies.

"To be sure, World War II was a product of deep ideological fissures among communist, fascist and democratic regimes, but these in turn reflected the deeper causes that lay in the clash between the 'have-not' empires of Germany, Italy and Japan and the Anglo-American 'haves.' The Japanese sought to compensate for their lack of foodstuffs and raw materials by establishing an empire on the Asian mainland, in Korea and China, initially in Manchuria. This brought them into conflict with the Americans and ultimately led to the attack on Pearl Harbor, an American outpost in the middle of the Pacific.

"For his part, Hitler looked to create a Germany with the critical mass 'needed' to balance the Anglo-Saxons by seizing 'living space' from the Soviet Union in the east. He was also convinced that 'world Jewry' was in league with both Soviet Bolshevism and Anglo-American international capitalism, seeking to isolate Germany just as it had allegedly done before and during World War I.

"The title of Mr Chamberlin’s book is well-chosen: The war was characterized by brutal policies. In China, the Japanese behaved with unimaginable brutality, most notoriously during the Rape of Nanjing in 1937. Nazi Germany not only murdered its way across the continent but killed six million Jews in a systematic policy of genocide. The Allies were not guilty of anything remotely comparable, but they likewise waged war to the utmost. Once Soviet soldiers reached German soil, they perpetrated hundreds of thousands of rapes. The British and Americans leveled German and Japanese cities, intentionally killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, and the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"The author, a professor at Columbia, keeps the global dimensions of the war in view at all times, particularly the connections between the European and Asian theaters. He notes that German victories in Europe in 1939 and 1940 undermined moderates in Tokyo and encouraged radicals there to go war with the Western powers. Mr Chamberlin also reminds us that President Roosevelt wrote in January 1941, nearly a full year before Pearl Harbor, that 'we must recognize that the hostilities in Europe, in Africa, and in Asia are all parts of a single world conflict.'

(ii) paragraph 7: "All this is conveyed in accessible, succinct prose that makes the book easy to read, even if the content is sometimes hard to stomach. Mr Chamberlin's vivid descriptions and quotations resonate. A Chinese witness told his son about a bombing raid [by Japan] during which a group of workers 'turned into bloody, fast-flying bits of flesh.' Faced with an American oil embargo in the autumn of 1941, one Japanese official feared that his country would be 'like a fish in a pond from which the water was gradually being drained away.' A Soviet journalist described the [Soviet] retreat before the Germans as a 'biblical exodus' in which cows, cattle, people, wagons and trucks formed 'the slow movement of a flowing ocean.'

(iii) paragraph 9: "Conceptually, the book has two weaknesses. First, though Mr Chamberlin is right to stress the importance of the often underestimated contributions to the Allied cause by the Chinese, he exaggerates those of the Soviets. While it is true that the Red Army killed more Germans and destroyed more tanks, the bigger share of the 'attrition' of the Third Reich—in terms of shipping, aircraft, antiaircraft and many other forms of industrial production—was wrought by the Anglo-Americans. Here the author would have profited from the work of Phillips O’Brien in 'How the War Was Won' (2015).

Note:
(i) French Third Republic (1970-1940; a "unitary [one chamber] parliamentary republic" with president and prime minister)
(ii) "Mr Chamberlin is right to stress the importance of the often underestimated contributions to the Allied cause by the Chinese"

Maybe, just maybe, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's contribution to resistance to Japan is no trivia, by extension.

choi

(2) Jonathan Horn ("the author, most recently, of 'The Fate of the Generals; MacArthur, Wainwright, and the epic battle for the Philippines": column introduced), Books on World War II Generals. Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2025, at page C7 (in the weekend column "Five Best")
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... i-generals-8589e1b4

Note:
(a) "From Marshall's selection followed many other felicitous choices, none more important than Dwight D Eisenhower"
(i)
(A) English dictionary:
* felicitous (adj; Did You Know?)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/felicitous

Etymology Online says this adjective came "from felicity + -ous." The felicity is English noun for happiness.
(B) Felix the Cat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_the_Cat
(table: Gender: ,ale)

The corresponding female given name (of humans) is Felicia.
(C) Latin-English dictionary:
* felix (adjective masculine/ feminine/neuter SINGULAR; adjective neuter PLURAL fēlīcia): "happy"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/felix
(ii)
(A) George C Marshall (1880 – 1959; fill birth name: George Catlett Marshall Jr)
(B) Dwight D Eisenhower (1890 – 1969; The Eisenhauer (German for 'iron hewer' or 'iron miner') family migrated from the German village of Karlsbrunn [in present-day federal state of Saarland] to the Province of Pennsylvania in 1741")
(b) Pay attention to book 4, an autobiography.
(c) "honest life-and-times biography"

Mike Mendis, What Does 'Life and Times' Mean? Dec 19, 2014
https://mmendis.wordpress.com/20 ... nd-times-in-london/
("In the phrase 'life and times,' the word 'life' refers to the events in a person's life and the word 'times' refers to the historical context of that person's life (that is, what was going on in society and the world at large when that person was alive). It is often used in titles of biographies, for example, 'The Life and Times of William Shakespeare' ")
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Commander in Chief
By Eric Larrabee (1987)
1. Unlike Abraham Lincoln, who found his successful generals in the Civil War through protracted and painful trial and error, Franklin D. Roosevelt required few trials and seldom made errors in his choices for high command during World War II. “Somehow the right men were found, and it is asking too much of coincidence to suppose that care had not gone into their selection,” writes Eric Larrabee in “Commander in Chief.” Certainly, that was the case for the decision to elevate George C. Marshall, the Army’s 34th most senior general, to Army chief of staff in 1939, even though Marshall had dared to buck the president at a meeting. “Don’t you think so, George?” Roosevelt had asked of a plan to prioritize the buildup of airpower over manpower, only to find Marshall didn’t think so “at all.” From Marshall’s selection followed many other felicitous choices, none more important than Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would go on to command Allied forces in Europe. “The story of Marshall,” Larrabee writes, “in good part becomes . . . the story of Eisenhower, who could always be sure that Marshall was behind him and that behind Marshall stood” Roosevelt. In such ways, Roosevelt assembled the generals and admirals who would win World War II. Larrabee weaves together their stories into a narrative far richer and more expansive than his title suggests.


Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45
By Barbara W. Tuchman (1971)
2. “There will never be a single work of history with me in it,” Joseph Stilwell wrote years before World War II. At the time, he could not have imagined the fodder his diary and other private musings would provide for Barbara Tuchman in “Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45.” Described by the author as “impatient, acid, impolitic,” Stilwell more than lived up to his nickname of “Vinegar Joe.” In fairness, George Marshall described the mission that Stilwell took on during World War II as the top American general in China and as the chief of staff to the country’s nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek as beset with complications “in a degree I do not believe any other commander of modern times has experienced.” Stilwell discovered that Chiang had less interest in fighting the Japanese than in shoring up power over his fellow Chinese. Americans had based their policy in China on a delusional view of the nationalist leader. “Probably never before had the people of one country viewed the government of another under misapprehension so complete,” Tuchman writes. In her telling, the folly and frustration would almost be funny if not for all the blood spilled, the vast sums of American aid squandered and the thought of the good that a general as gifted as Stilwell might have done elsewhere.


Patton
By Carlo D’Este (1995)
3. When quoting letters written by the subject of his biography “Patton,” Carlo D’Este explains he has preserved misspellings and punctuational oddities because to do otherwise would conceal the learning disability that George Patton himself could not hide from contemporaries. A “feeling of inferiority,” D’Este writes, “is the key not only to understanding the source of Patton’s drive to succeed, but of the authoritarian, macho, warrior personality he deliberately created for himself.” From this act of self-invention sprang a man of many contradictions: an amateur poet predisposed to outbursts of profanity; an Olympic pentathlete prone to the most bizarre of accidents; a well-read military historian convinced that his knowledge of ancient battles owed to having fought in them in his “past lives”; a general who slapped soldiers for what he called cowardice even as he privately fretted that he himself might succumb to fear; a military genius whose public relations off the battlefield distracted from his great triumphs during World War II. Although Patton made a habit of practicing a “ferocious” face in the mirror, D’Este says that he “never deceived those who really knew him”—evidently not his biographer either.


General Wainwright’s Story
By Jonathan M. Wainwright (1946)
4. After his liberation from a prison camp in Manchuria at the end of World War II, Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright IV returned to the U.S. and commenced work on a series of newspaper articles that would become “General Wainwright’s Story,” a poignant memoir that takes readers through the desperate stand that troops under his command made in the Philippines in the early months of the war and the years of humiliation that he endured afterward as the highest-ranking American prisoner of the Japanese. Douglas MacArthur had escaped to Australia before the surrender of the Philippines, but Wainwright had vowed to remain and share the fate of his besieged garrison—and share it he did. A journalist assisting Wainwright with his memoir watched him one morning as he reviewed a section that recalled how his soldiers saluted him after he surrendered them in May 1942. Wainwright drew his pencil and added these words: “I am a student of the Civil War, but not until then did I know how General R.E. Lee felt after Appomattox.”


The Years of MacArthur
By D. Clayton James (1970-85)
5. “No character in modern American military history, even Patton, has been the subject of as much adulation and condemnation” as Douglas MacArthur, writes D. Clayton James early in the first volume of “The Years of MacArthur.” The same officer who became famous for his eagerness to expose himself to enemy fire during World War I became known to some of his soldiers early in World War II as “Dugout Doug” for his failure to visit them more often on the front lines. In defiance of MacArthur’s admirers and critics as well as the general’s own penchant for hyperbole, James sets out to write what he calls “a reasonably comprehensive, balanced, and honest life-and-times biography”—and succeeds. The author, for the most part, resists concluding his three volumes with sweeping assessments but does predict that future historians and biographers will view MacArthur’s role in rebuilding Japan after World War II as the “zenith” of his career.
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choi

(3) Walter R Borneman, A Tale of Two Generals. When McArthur left the Philippines in 1942, Wainwright and his forces stayed back to fight the Japanese. McArthur never forgave him for capitulating to the enemy. Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2025, at page C7
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... -at-bataan-f7083db7
(book review on Jonathan Horn, The Fate of the Generals; MacArthur, Wainwright, and the epic battle for the Philippines. Scribner, 2025)

Note:
(a) Bataan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan
(map)
. whose accent is on the second syllable.
(b) If you do not have time, read the second half that starts with: "But in the first months of 1942."

Unlike Chinese emperors in millennia or Russians in World War II (both executed generals in defeat), Americans reward even generals who surrender.
(c) The review in print carries two photos:
(i) main photo with the caption: "USS MISSOURI Gen Douglas MacArthur signs the Japanese surrender documents on Sept 2, 1945. Gen Jonathan Wainwright standing behind him."
(photo attached at the bottom)
(ii) side photo with the caption: "POW  MacArthur and an emaciated Wainwright in Yokohama, Japan, in August 1945."

Witnesses: Percival & Wainwright on V-J Day; On V-J Day, MacArthur invited two unexpected guests to witness the signing. The National WWII Museum, undated
https://www.nationalww2museum.or ... l-wainwright-vj-day
(photo caption: "MacArthur greets a gaunt Wainwright after the latter's release from Japanese captivity in August 1945. US Army photograph")

The side photo in the WSJ review is the same as the preceding photo in the museum.
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In the darkest days of World War II, Gens. Douglas MacArthur and Jonathan Wainwright faced unsurmountable odds. Only one of them, however, was responsible for their dilemma. Against the threat of Japanese invasion in 1941, MacArthur had convinced George Marshall, the Army chief of staff, that the long-held American strategy to defend the Philippines by concentrating forces around Manila was flawed and that MacArthur could protect the entire archipelago. Marshall approved, and MacArthur scattered his forces and supplies across Luzon and the other islands.

Only after Pearl Harbor did MacArthur acknowledge that the well-equipped, 200,000-man American-led Filipino army he had proposed existed solely under the brim of his gold-braided garrison cap. As he reversed his islands-wide deployment, the mad rush to move men and materiel to meet the invaders on the beaches of Luzon, and to fortify that island’s southwest peninsula of Bataan, put MacArthur’s field commanders, particularly Wainwright, in an untenable position.

Theatrical to a fault, MacArthur proclaimed he would never leave the Philippines except by direct presidential order. This he received in March 1942, and it led to his harrowing PT-boat escape from Corregidor. MacArthur chose to take his staff along, although the order did not include them. The “Bataan Gang” became MacArthur’s praetorian guard, eternally loyal to him and his view of the world. To most outsiders, however, they were sycophants operating on the fringes of reality.

Wainwright had his own circle of loyalists. He stood 6-foot-2 and weighed only 125 pounds when he entered West Point three years behind MacArthur. He acquired the nickname Skinny, and it stuck with him his entire career. Raised in a military family on frontier posts across the West, Wainwright, like MacArthur, was a 19th-century soldier confronting the new warfare of the 20th century. But, as Jonathan Horn tells us in “The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines,” that is where his similarities with MacArthur ended.

Wainwright believed in an agile armed force. During his commencement speech to the graduates at Fort Riley’s Cavalry School in 1935, Wainwright argued that “mobility,” whether by horse or by mechanized vehicle, “must still remain our watchword.” When they received their orders, they “should be able to move out at once.” MacArthur’s standard mode of operation—at least early in the war—was the opposite of mobility and proved downright paralyzing in the hours immediately after Pearl Harbor.

But in the first months of 1942, when the American public desperately needed a hero and craved any hint that America was fighting back, MacArthur obliged. With a slew of communiques wrapped around his name alone, MacArthur swept aside criticism of his vacillations and engaged in misdirection. “Instead of having to answer” to the policymakers “for the loss of his air force or his whiplash-like shift” in war plans, Mr. Horn writes, they had to answer him “for failing to meet his demands for reinforcements.”

MacArthur led the public to believe he was outnumbered in the Philippines. In fact, the Japanese troops who made surprise landings at multiple points on Luzon numbered only half his force. Yet MacArthur’s penchant for hyperbole was never more misdirected than when he gave false hope to Wainwright’s men on Bataan during his lone visit there. Japan’s “temporary superiority of the air would soon be a thing of the past,” MacArthur promised, and he “would soon reoccupy Manila.” Wainwright knew better. He saw the future in the hollow eyes and sagging bellies of his men during his daily visits to the front.

Recounting battle scenes with riveting prose, Mr. Horn minces no words in his descriptions of the horrors of Bataan. The food stores that MacArthur had ordered to be held in reserve never made it to Bataan in sufficient quantities. Surrounded, malnourished and seemingly deserted by MacArthur, who had ordered them there, Wainwright’s troops became, as one correspondent labeled them, “the battling Bastards of Bataan.”

Two months after MacArthur escaped from Corregidor, Wainwright, placed by Marshall in overall command of the islands, had no choice but to surrender the Philippines or face mass extermination. MacArthur was livid. He never forgave Wainwright, thinking the surrender impugned MacArthur’s prior actions—which in many respects it did.

Shortly after MacArthur fled to Australia, Marshall recommended MacArthur for the Medal of Honor for his defense of the Philippines, an award calculated to boost American morale. After Wainwright’s surrender, amid rumors of the Bataan Death March, Marshall recommended Wainwright for his own Medal of Honor. It would show the world and Wainwright himself—who battled doubts and depression about how even his own family viewed him—that he had fought honorably. Opposition to the medal came from only one person—Douglas MacArthur. Wainwright’s actions did not measure up, MacArthur told Marshall, who chose to defer the award and avoid a wartime dispute with MacArthur.

After three years of captivity, an emaciated Wainwright was present at the Japanese surrender ceremony on the deck of USS Missouri, not because MacArthur had invited him, but because Marshall ordered it. Marshall also saw to it that Wainwright finally received the Medal of Honor, a medal, Mr. Horn concludes, that Wainwright did not need “to find honor.” For his part, Wainwright remained loyal to MacArthur throughout, refraining from any public criticism and even taking on the unenviable task of seconding MacArthur’s longshot bid for the 1948 Republican presidential nomination.

In presenting this dual biography, Mr. Horn, a former White House speechwriter whose books include a biography of Robert E. Lee, travels the well-trod path of MacArthur literature, including many quotations from MacArthur’s own “Reminiscences” (1964). What makes this study worthwhile is the author’s juxtaposition of what we have long known about MacArthur with the lesser-known actions and agonies endured by Wainwright. “The Fate of the Generals” lifts Jonathan Wainwright out of the shadow of Douglas MacArthur and “back into the light.”