If an American ever kept his promise, it was this one:
"I shall return."
Douglas MacArthur said it and delivered with a vengeance.
Just three years after the Army general slipped from Japan's jab in the Philippines, he recaptured the Asian country and decked the once invincible Axis heavyweight — first reinstalling the Philippine government in Manila in February 1945, then overseeing the Rising Sun's setting and the end of World War II seven months later.
"To Filipinos," reported Time magazine in 1961, "MacArthur is a hero without flaw. 'I shall return,' he promised in retreat before the Japanese in the first dark days of 1942; and he kept his promise when U.S. troops stormed back into the Philippines in 1944. He returned again in 1946 to watch as the U.S. ... bestowed independence on the Philippines."
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