Douglas MacArthur, General of the US Army and Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, Governor of the Ryukyu Islands, Commander of the Far East Command and the first Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers after World War Two, was one of the most respected soldiers in US history. You youngest Major General in US history, his military career spanned six decades.
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Serving with distinction in both world wars, his actions in the US Pacific theater during World War Two were decisive and instrumental in both bringing the fight to the Japanese, and ensuring they were pushed back to their homeland. In 1945 there were few military figures as respected as him.
But MacArthur was certainly not done with victory against the Japanese. East Asia would remain far from peaceful, and he would eventually find gainful employment in the Korean war, which kicked off in earnest in 1951.
The struggle for the Korean peninsula was the first true proxy war of the modern age, a fight between Communist China and the United States played out in miniature. And MacArthur had some slightly worrying ideas about how to prosecute the war.
