Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Douglas MacArthur
Too often overlooked today, the New Guinea campaign was the longest of the Pacific War, with 340,000 Americans fighting more than half a million Japanese.
Jim Duffy is author of the recent book, War at the End of t Read more >>
Miscalculations and blunders by world leaders precipitated the Korean War 60 years ago
On its 60th anniversary, the Korean War looks much like Vietnam, a pointless conflict that gained nothing for those who began it: North Korea’s Kim Il-sung and South Korea’s Syngman Rhee, with the consent of the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong. Yet it was far worse than that: The bloodletting in that corner of northeast Asia was an exercise in human folly that cost all sides in the fighting nearly 4 million lives lost, missing, and wounded, not to mention the devastation of the peninsula from Pusan in the south to the Yalu River in the north. Not a single northern or southern Korean city escaped the ravages wrought by modern warfare. Public buildings and private homes were turned into piles of rubble, while thousands of refugees fled from the scenes of battle.
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TRUMAN DISMISSES MACARTHUR
On April 10 in Washington (April 11 in Asia), President Harry S. Truman removed Gen. Douglas MacArthur as the Army’s supreme Asian commander, replacing him with Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway. Read more >>
Why a 200-year-old decoration offers evidence in the controversy surrounding the Hiroshima bombing.
Fifty years ago in the frozen mountains of Korea, the Marines endured a campaign as grueling and heroic as any in history
The Korean conflict erupted fifty years ago this June. Many Americans still believe that it began in debacle (which is true) and ended in a humiliating compromise that changed nothing (which is not).
Why were twenty wounded American soldiers released on Thanksgiving in 1950, days before the Chinese attacked in Korea?
On Thanksgiving Day 1950, two months after General MacArthur’s masterly strategic stroke at Inchon, I was seventy-five miles south of Manchuria, posted to a battalion-sized 25th Infantry Division Task Force named for its commander, Lt. Col. Weldon G. Dolvin. Read more >>
Half a century after his father’s death, he struck up an extraordinary friendship with a man who had been there
My quest began sometime shortly after World War II. I was a young boy when my maternal grandfather told me the story of how my father, Lt. Col. Francis R. Stevens, had been killed in the skies over New Guinea. Read more >>
An overheard remark sent the author off on a years-long quest to discover the truth about a man whose power to inspire both rage and reverence has only grown after his death
As a ten-year-old boy, the author had a role to play in bringing Douglas MacArthur’s vision of democracy to a shattered Japan
On August 30, 1945, just days after Japan capitulated, ending World War II, Douglas MacArthur first set foot on the island nation, to set up temporary headquarters at the New Grand Hotel in Yokohama—and to set in motion a unique experiment that little more than three and a half Read more >>
Truman was Commander in Chief of the American armed forces, and he had a duty to the men under his command not shared by those sitting in moral judgment decades later
On the morning of August 6, 1945, the American B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another B-29, Bock’s Car , released one over Nagasaki. Read more >>
The half-remembered Korean conflict was full of surprises, and nearly all of them were unpleasant
Korea is in the news again, and it’s ugly news. North Korea may or may not have the capability to make nuclear weapons, and North Korea’s aging dictator, Kim Il Sung, is unwilling to let international inspectors find out. The United Nations is talking of sanctions. Read more >>
After every war in the nation’s history, the military has faced not only calls for demobilization but new challenges and new opportunities. It is happening again.
Not many people appreciate a military base closing. Like the shutting of a factory, it can devastate nearby towns, throwing thousands of people out of work. Merchants face losses and even bankruptcy as sales fall off. Read more >>
The old Regular Army, part fairy tale and part dirty joke, was generally either ignored or disdained. But its people went about their work with a dogged humdrum gallantry—and when the storm broke, they helped save the world.
The old school is alive with the memory of men like Lee, Grant, Pershing, and Eisenhower
Each year most of West Point’s three million visitors enter the U.S. Military Academy through the Thayer Gate. Read more >>
Two letters from a Navy lieutenant to his wife tell the story of the last hours of World War II
YOKOSUKA 9·4·45
My dear: Read more >>
When the President fired the general, civilian control of the military faced its severest test in our history
AT 1:00 A.M. ON THE morning of April 11, 1951, a tense band of Washington reporters filed into the White House newsroom for an emergency press conference. Read more >>
A soldier remembers the freezing, fearful retreat down the Korean Peninsula after the Chinese armies smashed across the border
THERE ARE places on this globe to which history can point and say of a people, a nation, or an empire: “This was their high-water mark. Read more >>
A SUBMARINE COMMANDER TELLS WHY WE ALMOST LOST THE PACIFIC WAR
LIFE ABOARD
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What’s Happened to the Long Gray Line
No monument or institution has more power to stir the patriotic emotions of Americans, or evokes more poignintly the martial virtues of self-sacrifice and discipline, than the United States Military Academy at West Point. In the view of General George S. Read more >>
Sixteen years before Pearl Harbor an English naval expert uncannily prophesied in detail the war in the Pacific. Now comes evidence that the Japanese heeded his theories—but not his warnings
As soon as Imperial Japan destroyed the Russian Navy in a spectacular sea battle at the Straits of Tsushima in 1905, a rash of would-be Cassandras began to foretell the day when the rays of the Rising Sun would spread eastward across the Pacific, bringing Jap Read more >>