REVIEW BY GRAHAM GOODLAD
General Douglas MacArthur is arguably the most controversial military leader in US history. His command career was bookended by two divisive episodes. As Army Chief of Staff in 1932, he earned notoriety for forcibly removing the ‘Bonus Army’ of unemployed servicemen protestors from Washington DC. Almost two decades later, he was sacked by President Truman, following a public falling out over his call to extend the Korean War to China. It was with the Philippines, however – a US territory from 1898 to 1946 – that MacArthur’s career was inextricably entwined. He served there as a young officer before World War I, and returned to head the Philippines armed forces and to superintend the defence of the islands in 1935.
As Peter Mansoor notes in the preface to Redemption, biographies of MacArthur are numerous, yet there are relatively few complete histories of his 1944-1945 Philippines campaign. In writing about the Pacific conflict, it has been overshadowed by, for example, multiple studies of the Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. True, there are several books about individual actions in the Philippines, such as the sea battle at Leyte Gulf – the largest naval engagement in history – and the intense, Stalingrad-style struggle for control of Manila. But what Peter Mansoor has now given us is an up-to-date, single-volume narrative of the whole campaign.
Mansoor, a retired US Army colonel, now professor at Ohio State University, writes fluently and engagingly. The breadth and depth of his research is demonstrated in the book’s footnotes and its wide-ranging guide to further reading. Japan’s occupation of the Philippines in the first half of 1942, which is generally better known than the later reconquest, is covered in the first chapter. The retaking of New Guinea, which formed a prelude to the Philippines campaign, is the subject of Chapter 2. The greater part of Redemption is concerned with the intense period from the US landings at Leyte in October 1944 to the end of hostilities ten months later – the operation that cancelled out the capitulation of three years before.
Seventy years of tiddlywinks