How insane were Douglas McArthur and Curtis LeMay?

They had too much MAGA in’em.

They come from a time when American lives meant more than anyone else. In today's world we treat all human life pretty much the same. To them 1 american was worth more than 100 of any other country's population. They also believed in total war. Which is why they wouldve never lost. Great men in my eyes

McArthur was right


He also said that we fought the wrong guys in Europe in ww2

Insane? Insanely awesome maybe.

If you’re going to go to war, commit to it and commit to winning.

You're talking about people who were tasked with waging a world war against one of the most brutal enemies imaginable and in mankind's most savage style of warfare to date. They were leaders in the transition stage from conventional warfare to nuclear warfare when there was great uncertainty about how future warfighting would be conducted. The Chinese had no nuclear weapons at the time, so using nukes to prevent their successful intervention in the Korean War would have resulted in absolute U.S. victory in Korea and perhaps would have undermined and destroyed the Communist regime in China. Tactical nuclear weapons were seen as legitimate battlefield weaponry in many military theory circles at the time and were viewed as legitimate weapons to wield against strategic military targets.

It's easy to look back on that time with the current thinking regarding nuclear warfare. The Korean War began in 1950. That's just 5 years removed from WWII.

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Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.

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Gen Curtis LeMay

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The whole idea is to kill the bastards

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Utterly false. The point of war is to force someone else to do what you want after negotiations fail.

Destroying stuff and killing people is enormously wasteful.

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At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win."

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It’s a miracle the Earth is still here.

One of the little füts has a Grandfather-in-law who is a 98 year-old Marine and was captured on Corregidor and subsequently spent 3.5 years as a Japanese POW.

Obviously his judgement of MacArthur might be tinged with a personal aspect but he considers that the General deserted his post on Corregidor.

I would say the man has earned a right to hold that opinion.

You mis-state MacArthur’s position and only tell half the story.

His point was that a country should not be willing to commit troops unless it is willing to use every tool at its disposal to win a war (and in Korea, that most likely involved the use of nuclear weapons near the Yalu). Nothing short of that standard is adequate, and a country should either not enter in the first place OR be willing to use everything at its disposal to win if necessary. Limited war is largely fruitless and wasteful, and American military history since 1950 has proven him prescient in that regard.

He was among the first of his generation to grasp (and had re-learned a lesson that Sherman and Grant learned 85 years before him) that the deadliest aspect of modern war is length, not weaponry or brutality. His approach also necessitates that when a country commits to war, it really commits. Not this half-assed imperial boutique army shite that Truman and Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Bush Jr. and Obama have loved.

Your counter-factual is absurd on its face. First, nine figures dead - who? With what delivery system? Why?

Second, I propose another, probably more realistic one: that tens of millions would not have died in Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Wars has we obliterated part of their country along the Yalu and de-stabilized their regime. And tens millions of North Koreans wouldn’t have suffered horridly and died at the hands of the most brutal regime in the modern world.