re: Gen. Douglas MacArthur "dug out dug"

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Look up the Battle of Inchon. Get back to me.

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Well you bring up a good point here. MacArthur is just one example of a general that at times looked brilliant and others quite inept. And to be fair he's far from the only general to have both spectacular defeats and failure intermingled with equally spectacular victory and success.

So while it's fair fault his performance at the Philippines in 1941 -42. It should also be pointed out that no matter what he did, the Philippines were going to fall. and after the Philippines his performance was quite good.

As for the matter of him wasting the lives of "good Marines", I'll point out that his favored tactic in WWII, one that he would later use at Inchon, was to instead of attacking the enemy head on in costly frontal attacks against their fortified positions, to by-pass and out flank the enemy using amphibious assaults to get around and behind tier forces. Look at his handling of the New Guinea Campaign and how he repeatedly by-passed strong Japanese forces as he moved ever closer to the Philippines while minimizing his own losses.

And along with this, I'll point out that while MacArthur was using his "hit them where they ain't" strategy to good effect, it was Admiral Nimitz who was at the same time overseeing the Solomon Islands Campaignthat featured some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, including the Battles of Guadalcanal and Bougainville. And keep in mind that following the Solomons Campaign, Nimitz then commanded the Gilbert Islands Campaign that saw the bloody, and very unnecessary, battle of Tarawa.

So while it's fair to criticize MacArthur in many regards, wasting the lives of his men is not one of them. Of the two main allied leaders in the Pacific, Nimitz arguably wasted far more lives than MacArthur.