He was, flamboyantly, a man of action, but as commander of the Army forces in the Far East he was so stunned at the news of Pearl Harbor that when the Japanese planes appeared over Clark airfield in the Philippines nine hours later, his entire force of bombers was still just sitting there, unprotected, wing tip to wing tip. Yet during the long, desperate fighting on Bataan, he only once made the fiveminute trip from his headquarters to the battlefront to bolster the morale of his discouraged, starving troops. MacArthur’s bravery was legendary, sometimes carried to the point of foolhardiness: he would never wear a helmet in combat, he refused to have a bodyguard in postwar Japan, he wouldn’t even buckle his seat belt on a plane. 816 pages, 100 photographs and an 8-page map insert, $15.00ĭouglas MacArthur was a man of staggering contradictions, and in this scrupulously researched and apparently fair biography, William Manchester doesn’t pretend that he can make all the conflicting pieces fit together.
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