A modern major general

For those who are interested, there’s a new account of the action in 1918 that laid the foundation of the Douglas MacArthur’s reputation as a heroic combat leader. The WSJ published a review yesterday.

If I can find it in the King County Library System, I might venture a read, but I won’t be ordering it from Amazon. (For one thing, since moving to metro Seattle, I now have to pay the extortionate 9% sales tax on my Amazon purchases; I’ve thought a whole lot more before hitting that Submit Order button since coming here.) This sort of thing just boils my blood, so I don’t need to have the account in my permanent collection.

(Similarly, I own no biographies of George B. McClellan or Bernard Montgomery, generals whose greatest skills involved self-promotion and whining about how it was the fault of everyone else but themselves that their campaigns failed. Over and over.)

Frankly, it should come as no surprise that MacArthur’s glory-hounding and hot-dogging began by taking credit for the true heroics of subordinates at the Côte de Châtillon a month before the end of the Great War. This was a guy who had personal aggrandizement at the forefront of all his command decisions, as was obvious throughout the Second World War.

What’s interesting is that it took 90 years for someone to look at the anomalies in the accounts of the action and point out that the imperial commander really had no clothes. MacArthur’s self-promotion was so polished and so consistent, everyone apparently just swallowed it. (It continues today in the form of the MacArthur Memorial Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, founded by MacArthur’s second wife. It’s a kind of low-rent militaristic hagiography.)

It took a pragmatic, hardnosed, unpolished public servant from Missouri to finally put an end to this man’s career. MacArthur continued his public posturing, but at least he wasn’t paying for it with the blood and bodies of a conscripted army.

Anyway—I put this out here for you. You might find the book interesting. And kudos to Ferrell for finally discovering and publishing the truth.