The most recommended Douglas MacArthur books

In view of the numerous controversies and varied views of General MacArthur’s actions and policies in the Pacific War, it is great to have a balanced and very carefully researched and presented account of a commander who was in it from Japan’s attack on the United States to Japan’s surrender. While dealing fairly with some of the criticisms of the general, Borneman does note his repeated announcements of battles being ended when they were not as well as the hopeless incompetence of his intelligence chief.

I enjoy military history and learning about timeframes that are less familiar to me, like the Korean War in this instance. 

Shaara brings history to life by revealing events through the eyes of those experiencing it firsthand. He does not focus on the stories and myths of “heroes” or those considered to be by posterity but instead focuses on the grind of the ordinary moments suffered day by day. 

The stories seem both personal and believable, the tragic and the heroic.

Similar to Eichelberger, few today know the name of General George Kenney who commanded the Allied Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) from the 1942 defense of Papua New Guinea to the surrender of Japan.

Again, MacArthur’s need to dominate all headlines from his military theater explains the relative obscurity of his field generals. But Kenney’s story, related in his own words, should not be overlooked.

He was arguably the most innovative and successful air commander of the WWII. He demanded aggressiveness from his pilots, mounted .50-caliber machine guns onto pretty much anything that could fly and insisted on implementing the dangerous but deadly tactics of parachute fragmentation bombing on land and mast-height and skip-bombing against Japanese shipping at sea.  

I thought I knew a thing or two about the history of World War II. Somehow, the battle for New Guinea escaped me, despite the role played by the American General, Douglas MacArthur. Significant as a turning point in the war and enabling MacArthur's return to the Philippines, the fight in New Guinea deserves mention in the same breath as the stepping-stone battles of the Pacific islands. The fighting was brutal and the conditions for both Japanese and Allied troops were horrid—trails ascending rugged mountains, supply-chain difficulties, diseases that diminished the abilities of troops to fight. I have been to New Guinea twice. Duffy captured the ruggedness of the land and his telling of the stories made me feel the place, the people, and their challenges.

This book recounts the remarkable life of one of my childhood heroes, the Canadian aviation pioneer Grant McConachie. Much of McConachie’s early career was spent as a bush pilot flying aircraft in the service of communities in Northern Canada. His exploits would make a fine Hollywood movie: A daring rescue of two brothers in northern Alberta burned by an exploding stove, making the first commercial flight over the Rocky Mountains from Calgary to Vancouver, becoming the president of Canadian Pacific Airlines at the age of thirty-seven, and even a memorable encounter with General Douglas MacArthur in postwar Japan. A fictionalized Grant McConachie appears in the alternate history story “The Coming Age of the Jet” in my own collection.

Gordon Prange spent more than three decades in the research and writing of this book, first as the chief historian for General Douglas MacArthur during the occupation of Japan and then as a history professor at the University of Maryland. He used his position to interview many Japanese officials – both military and civilian – who were engaged in the planning and execution of the attack at Pearl Harbor. The book was a landmark achievement in addressing the planning of the attack, the attack itself, and the subsequent investigations in the US about how and why American forces were so unprepared. Sadly, Prange died in 1980, only months before the book was published.

Isabel Rosario Cooper was not just a movie starlet during the golden age of Hollywood; she was also preyed on by General MacArthur. The book shows just how difficult it was for Asian American actors to make it in Hollywood and leads one to wonder if things have really changed that much today.

Santo Tomas Internment Camp is unusual because it was published with money gathered from internees in the camp, and delivered by subscription. It is a favored artifact of internees for its intimate portrayal of them and how they survived three years under Japanese rule. Santo Tomas Internment Camp is usually only available from camp internees and their families.

This book gave me a basic understanding of the New Guinea war into which my father was sent. It gave me the framework with which I could piece together the timeline of my father’s service. It gave me an idea of the progress of the war and a context for all of his military orders, his stacks of correspondence, and all of his photos, long stored away in his Navigation Case.

This work is different from previous books suggested here. It is only recently published, but it presents revised versions of essays that sometimes date back a decade or more. Superbly written with great clarity, its strong points are the detail and care with which it spells out how economic factors are woven into American foreign policy and national security strategies.

The author’s subtle understanding of how nuclear weapons dilemmas, historical choices, industrial structures, and bureaucratic competition combine in actual policymaking puts most literature on international relations to shame. In a multi-polar world that is becoming ever more dangerous and in which the specter of nuclear war is again rising, Kurth’s discussions of imperial overextension, the limits of hegemony by one great power, and related topics are extraordinarily timely. Its accounts of major international crises and national security policy point up the shallowness of most American foreign policy discussions and the… show more.