Douglas Macarthur Quotes

Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

It is fatal to enter an war without the will to win it.

Age wrinkles the body; quitting wrinkles the soul.

Give me ten thousand Filipino soldiers and I will conquer the world.

We are not retreating - we are advancing in another Direction

The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.

The enemy is in front of us, the enemy is behind us, the enemy is to the right and to the left of us. They can't get away this time!

I am concerned for the security of our great Nation; not so much because of any treat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.

Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.

I had learned one of the bitter lessons of life: never try to regain the past, the fire will have become ashes.

Once war is forced upon us, there is no alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory-not prolonged indecision.

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair." Douglas MacArthur

I Shall Return

On the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that on other days, on other fields will bear the fruits of victory.

Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope as old as your despair. In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, so long are you young. When your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and then only, are you grown old. And then, indeed as the ballad says, you just fade away

Last, but by no means least, courage of one's convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It's the age-old struggle_ the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.

You don't win wars by dying for your country you win wars by making the other son of a bitch die for his

He was a thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy, the best of me and the worst of men, the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime. No more baffling, exasperating soldier ever wore a uniform. Flamboyant, imperious, and apocalyptic, he carried the plumage of a flamingo, could not acknowledge errors, and tried to cover up his mistakes with sly, childish tricks. Yet he was also endowed with great personal charm, a will of iron, and a soaring intellect. Unquestionably he was the most gifted man-at arms- this nation has produced. -William Manchester on Douglas MacArthur

I realize that advice is worth what it costs--that is, nothing.

Mr. President. Douglas MacArthur said every military disaster can be explained in two words: ‘Too late.

Americans never quit.

Listen--God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like--they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American comping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o--God's no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't. ~pages 286-287

This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war.

I will not take by sacrifice what I can achieve by strategy.

The history of the failure of war can almost be summed up in two words: too late.

You are remembered for the rules you break. DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

There is no substitute for victory.” – Douglas MacArthur

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency... Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

The clear suggestion is that there ought not to be civilian control of the military. What have callow noncombatants giving brisk orders to grizzled soldiers? How could Lincoln have fired the slavery-loving Gen. George B. McClellan, or Truman dismissed the glorious Douglas MacArthur?

Few names have left a firmer imprint upon the pages of the history of American times than has that of Ty Cobb... he seems to have understood that in the competition of baseball, just as in war, defensive strategy never has produced ultimate victory.

People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples. We have come dedicated and committed to the task of destroying every vestige of enemy control over your daily lives, and of restoring upon a foundation of indestructible strength, the liberties of your people.

John Kennedy once remarked that “victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan.

Roosevelt is dead: a man who would never tell the truth when a lie would serve him just as well.

...that democracy works and will always work, because the people are allowed to think, to talk, and keep their minds free, open, and supple.

A soldier destroys in order to build; the father only builds, never destroys.

1. Success is a choice. -Rick Pitino 2. Success in life comes not from holding a good hand, but in playing a poor hand well. -Warren Lester 3. I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment; it takes place every day. -Albert Camus 4. If you're not fired up with enthusiasm, you'll be fired with enthusiasm. -Vince Lombardi 5. There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity. -Douglas MacArthur 6. Yesterday's the past and tomorrow's the future. Today is a gift, which is why they call it the present. -Bill Keane 7. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure. -Thomas Edison 8. When you get to the end of your rope tie a knot and hang on. -Franklin D. Roosevelt 9. The best way to predict your future is to create it. -Author unknown 10. I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says, "Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest." I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have. -Harry S Truman 11. Triumph? Try Umph! -Author unknown 12. You hit home runs not by chance but by preparation. -Roger Maris 13. If you don't have enough pride, you're going to get your butt beat every play. -Gale Sayers 14. My mother taught me very early to believe I could achieve any accomplishment I wanted to. The first was to walk without braces. -Wilma Rudolph 15. You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. -Margaret Thatcher

The Borderlander’s combative culture has provided a large proportion of the nation’s military, from officers like Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett, and Douglas MacArthur to the enlisted men fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. They also gave the continent bluegrass and country music, stock car racing, and Evangelical fundamentalism.

Age wrinkles the body, quitting wrinkles the soul.

General Douglas MacArthur was the most brilliant, most important, and most valuable military leader in American history—at least that’s what Douglas MacArthur thought. When

Well more than two thirds of the press releases from Douglas MacArthur's command reference only one person – himself.

Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won... A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war. Men since the beginning of time have sought peace... Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn have failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.

Douglas MacArthur said it well: “However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and give his life for his country, is the noblest development of mankind.

Duty, Honor, Country" — those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn...

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid; one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory. Build me a son whose wishbone will not be where his backbone should be; a son who will know Thee and that to know himself is the foundation stone of knowledge. Lead him, I pray, not in the path of ease and comfort, but under the stress and spur of difficulties and challenge. Here let him learn to stand up in the storm; here let him learn compassion for those who fail. Build me a son whose heart will be clean, whose goal will be high; a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men; one who will learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; one who will reach into the future, yet never forget the past. And after all these things are his, add, I pray, enough of a sense of humor, so that he may always be serious, yet never take himself too seriously. Give him humility, so that he may always remember the simplicity of greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength. Then I, his father, will dare to whisper, "I have not lived in vain.

It is from these cold, hard facts that Truman’s advisers estimated that between 250,000 and 1 million American lives would be lost in an invasion of Japan.59 General Douglas MacArthur estimated that there could be a 22:1 ratio of Japanese to American deaths, which translates to a minimum death toll of 5.5 million Japanese.60 By comparison (cold though it may sound), the body count from both atomic bombs—about 200,000 to 300,000 total (Hiroshima: 90,000 to 166,000 deaths, Nagasaki: 60,000 to 80,000 deaths61)—was a bargain.

set up to study the tactics and equipment required to defeat Japan, even recommended the use of mustard and phosgene gas against underground enemy positions, and was supported in this by Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur, but it was vetoed by President Roosevelt.

In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber. So long as it receives a message of beauty, hope, cheer, and courage — so long are you young. When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snow of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, are you grown old. — GENERAL DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

on November 6: in the rapidity and confusion of the advance, Douglas MacArthur, commanding an infantry brigade, was taken prisoner by his own side. Thinking he was a German officer, vigilant American sentries brought him in at pistol point. The mistake was quickly discovered, once MacArthur had taken off his unusual floppy hat and long scarf.

was an eighth cousin of Churchill, and a sixth cousin, once removed, of FDR—and three of World War II’s great leaders were thus linked by American intermarriages.

patriotism, vitiated by the growing global diaspora, has become parochial, a tarnished, disappearing virtue.

there are times when a truly remarkable soldier must resort to unorthodox behavior, disobeying his superiors to gain the greater glory.

There is no substitute for victory.

For the sentimentalism and emotionalism which have infested our country, we should substitute hard common sense. Pacific habits do not insure peace or immunity from national insult and aggression.

If there is anything that makes my blood boil it is to see our allies in Indochina and Java deploying Japanese troops to reconquer the little people we promised to liberate. It is the most ignoble kind of betrayal.

If Peking wasn’t stopped in the peninsular war, he argued, China would be recognized as “the military colossus of the East.” U.S. prestige would plummet, and the world’s new nations would gravitate toward neutralism.

The heart of the other quotation, from Lincoln, was: “If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, these shops might as well be closed to any other business. I do the very best I know how, and I mean to keep doing so to the end.

September 15, 1950, MacArthur launched a brilliantly conceived and executed amphibious landing at Inchon, trapping a large North Korean force after walking ashore several times to ensure a good take for the cameras, his ever-present corncob pipe jutting from his jaw.

Carey recalled Tillman turning to him and tapping him on the shoulder. "Look who's coming up the road!" he said incredulously. In a scene straight from a movie, General Douglas MacArthur confidently walked straight up the center of the road, "bullets flying around him." Carey was dumbfounded. As MacArthur walked up to his position, Carey pulled him behind the building. "The general fell over" and stared at the lieutenant, quickly snapping, "What the hell do you think you're doing, Lieutenant?" "I'm just trying to keep you from getting killed," Carey snapped back. MacArthur glared at Carey with icy presence and said, "There isn't a bullet made that can kill me.

Douglas MacArthur is one of those blips in history, an idiosyncratic figure who, for reasons hard to satisfactorily explain, acquired far more power than he had any reason to. In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, there were three such men, each operating on a different scale. On the level of the city, there was Robert Moses, who somehow managed to trade up authority over New York’s parks—a position that traditionally entailed little more than serving the needs of the city’s bird-watchers—into a decades-long stranglehold over municipal politics. On the national level, there was J. Edgar Hoover, the spymaster who held presidents under his thumb. And in foreign relations, exercising more effective authority than perhaps anyone else in U.S. history, it was Douglas MacArthur.

Arthur MacArthur was the most flamboyantly egotistic man I had ever seen, until I met his son.

If Tombstone is shut down and grabbed by the cops before Randy can erase those traces, they will know he has logged on at the very moment that Tombstone was confiscated, and will put him in prison for tampering with evidence. He very much wishes that Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe could somehow be made aware of what a ballsy thing he is doing here. But then Doug has probably done all kinds of ballsy things of which Randy will never be aware, and Randy respects him anyway because of his bearing. Maybe the way to get that kind of bearing is to go around doing ballsy things in secret that somehow percolate up to the surface of your personality.

You are remembered for the rules you break. – Douglas MacArthur

The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. ’It’s the age-old struggle: the roar of the crowd on the one side, and the voice of your conscience on the other. —Douglas MacArthur

But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war, there can be no substitute for victory.

Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability is in the opponent. —SUN TZU, THE ART OF WAR

You are only remembered and become famous because of your mistakes. —DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

Written by the great general Douglas MacArthur about his own son, the words are eloquent and touching. Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak; and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid; one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory. Build me a son whose wishes will not take the place of deeds; a son who will know Thee—and that to know himself is the foundation stone of knowledge. Lead him, I pray, not in the path of ease and comfort, but under the stress and spur of difficulties and challenge. Here let him learn to stand up in the storm; here let him learn compassion for those who fail. Build me a son whose heart will be clear, whose goal will be high, a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men, one who will reach into the future, yet never forget the past. And after all these things are his, add, I pray, enough of a sense of humor, so that he may always be serious, yet never take himself too seriously. Give him humility, so that he may always remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom and the meekness of true strength. Then I, his father, will dare to whisper, “I have not lived in vain.

In the fall of 1945, Valentine stepped down as police chief and became the regular Gang Busters narrator. In 1946 he left the show at the request of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who wanted him to reorganize the police departments in defeated Japan.

And like the old soldier in that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the sight to see that duty.” —Douglas MacArthur

Posted on the other side of the world, it was early on the morning of December 8 in the Philippines when Douglas MacArthur received news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor hours earlier. With that, it could only be a matter of time before the Japanese attacked the Philippines. MacArthur’s air commander, Lewis Brereton, urged an immediate bombing raid against Formosa, but MacArthur dithered. Eventually, the heavy B-17 Flying Fortresses were scrambled for their own protection, only to be caught back on the ground refueling when the expected Japanese air raids hit mid-morning.

Midway was merely a convenient target chosen by Yamamoto to draw the Americans out, and both sides’ objectives were attritional attempts to degrade their opponents’ carrier units. Nevertheless, the result created space for the Americans to begin their cautious advance back across the Pacific. This started with Guadalcanal and proceeded along two axes. Nimitz would command the larger and predominantly naval effort across the central Pacific, and island fortresses such as Saipan and Iwo Jima would soon go down in military legend. To the south, General Douglas MacArthur led a campaign across New Guinea and the Philippines, with a more land-based focus. Notwithstanding that, it was off Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in October 1944 that the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered a fatal blow in the largest naval battle in history, during which four carriers and three battleships were lost.

General Douglas MacArthur: “For years, I have believed that war should be abolished as an outmoded means for resolving disputes between nations.

General Douglas MacArthur said, “Youth is not entirely a time of life; it is a state of mind. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals.… You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.

Meanwhile Arthur, his recent disappointment with the army aside, had been giving a speech to a reunion of the 24th Wisconsin in Milwaukee on September 5, 1912, when he suffered a stroke and died at the podium. “My whole world changed that night,” Douglas later wrote. “Never have I been able to heal the wound in my heart.”23

Age wrinkles the body................Quitting wrinkles the soul.

Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up wrinkles the soul.

The first Superfortress reached Tokyo just after midnight, dropping flares to mark the target area. Then came the onslaught. Hundreds of planes—massive winged mechanical beasts roaring over Tokyo, flying so low that the entire city pulsed with the booming of their engines. The US military’s worries about the city’s air defenses proved groundless: the Japanese were completely unprepared for an attacking force coming in at five thousand feet. The full attack lasted almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm—a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles. Buildings burst into flame before the fire ever reached them. Mothers ran from the fire with their babies strapped to their backs only to discover—when they stopped to rest—that their babies were on fire. People jumped into the canals off the Sumida River, only to drown when the tide came in or when hundreds of others jumped on top of them. People tried to hang on to steel bridges until the metal grew too hot to the touch, and then they fell to their deaths. After the war, the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded: “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” As many as 100,000 people died that night. The aircrews who flew that mission came back shaken. [According to historian] Conrad Crane: “They’re about five thousand feet, they are pretty low... They are low enough that the smell of burning flesh permeates the aircraft...They actually have to fumigate the aircraft when they land back in the Marianas, because the smell of burning flesh remains within the aircraft. (...) The historian Conrad Crane told me: I actually gave a presentation in Tokyo about the incendiary bombing of Tokyo to a Japanese audience, and at the end of the presentation, one of the senior Japanese historians there stood up and said, “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs.” That kind of took me aback. And then he explained: “We would have surrendered eventually anyway, but the impact of the massive firebombing campaign and the atomic bombs was that we surrendered in August.” In other words, this Japanese historian believed: no firebombs and no atomic bombs, and the Japanese don’t surrender. And if they don’t surrender, the Soviets invade, and then the Americans invade, and Japan gets carved up, just as Germany and the Korean peninsula eventually were. Crane added, The other thing that would have happened is that there would have been millions of Japanese who would have starved to death in the winter. Because what happens is that by surrendering in August, that givesMacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually feedJapan...I mean, that’s one of MacArthur’s great successes: bringing in a massive amount of food to avoid starvation in the winter of 1945.He is referring to General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied powers in the Pacific. He was the one who accepted theJapanese emperor’s surrender.Curtis LeMay’s approach brought everyone—Americans and Japanese—back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible. In 1964, the Japanese government awarded LeMay the highest award their country could give a foreigner, the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, in appreciation for his help in rebuilding the Japanese Air Force. “Bygones are bygones,” the premier of Japan said at the time.

THE WORLD was alarmed, Harry Truman was livid. And he blamed Douglas MacArthur for getting him into this mess. In his five years as president, Truman had tolerated repeated slights and affronts from MacArthur

Some 4,887 miles to the east of him, north of the

councils of war breed timidity and defeatism.

I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. Douglas MacArthur

The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.” – Douglas MacArthur

General Douglas MacArthur said, “In war there is no substitute for victory.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

Once again Willoughby had let MacArthur down, as he had many times in the past. Yet this time MacArthur’s skill in improvisation, and his confidence that he would eventually come out on top no matter what the enemy did, would be put to the supreme test—even more so than in the Philippines in December 1941. It would take every ounce of willpower and stamina that the seventy-year-old supreme commander had, to turn around what was unfolding as a major disaster on the Korean peninsula.

Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul. — Douglas MacArthur

If anything, the destruction there was even more overwhelming and appalling. “Between seventy and eighty percent of the buildings had been destroyed, burned, bombed,” Egeberg remembered years later. Amid the ruins they spotted large water-tank affairs, also smashed and blackened. When Egeberg asked what they were, a foreign service officer said they’d been built and filled with water so that Tokyo residents could jump in them during firebombing raids. They hadn’t worked, the officer said. The people in them had simply been boiled to death in the intense heat.55

Age wrinkles the body; quitting wrinkles the soul.” – Douglas MacArthur

Known as "Ike,” Eisenhower was born prior to the Spanish American War on October 14, 1890. Graduating from West Point Military Academy in 1915, he served under a number of talented generals including John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, Douglas MacArthur and George Marshall. Although for the greatest time he held the rank of Major, he was quickly promoted to the rank of a five star general during World War II. During this war he served as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe. Eisenhower was responsible for organizing the invasion of North Africa and later in 1944, the invasion of Normandy, France and Germany. Following World War II, influential citizens and politicians from both political parties urged Eisenhower to run for president. Becoming a Republican, the popular general was elected and became the 34th President of the United States. Using the slogan “I like Ike!” he served as the 34th President of the United States from 1953 to 1961. Having witnessed the construction of the German Autobahn, one of lasting achievements we still use is the Interstate Highway System, authorized in 1956. ] He reasoned that our cities would be targets in a future war; therefore the Interstate highways would help evacuate them and allow the military greater flexibility in their maneuvers. Along with many other accomplishments during his administration, on January 3, 1959 Alaska became the 49th state and on August 21, 1959 Hawaii became the 50th state. On March 28, 1969, at 79 years of age, Eisenhower died of congestive heart failure at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington D.C. He was laid to rest on the grounds of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. Eisenhower is buried alongside his son Doud, who died at age 3 in 1921. His wife Mamie was later buried next to him after her death on November 1, 1979.

General Douglas MacArthur was the most brilliant, most important, and most valuable military leader in American history—at least that’s what Douglas MacArthur thought. When asked by a proper British gentlewoman if he had ever met the famous general, Dwight D. Eisenhower—himself about to march into history—supposedly replied, “Not only have I met him, ma’am; I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and four years in the Philippines.

General Douglas MacArthur’s Farewell Speech May 12, 1962 If you have made it this far, I leave you with MacArthur’s speech upon receiving the Sylvanus Thayer Award. Most consider this his farewell speech to his years of military service.

the essence of what General Douglas MacArthur said is right: All defense and no offense doesn’t get you very far. General Patton provides supporting cover when he advised, “Never let the enemy choose the battlefield.

In 1957, General Douglas MacArthur said, “Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear—kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fever—with the cry of a grave national emergency … Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

bruh moment

General Douglas Macarthur once said: “I am concerned for the security of our great nation; not so much because of any threat from without, but because of the insidious forces working from within.

Although there was no definitive proof, it was likely that General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander of the Southwest Pacific War and the media darling of the war despite having fled the Philippines and leaving his men and the Filipinos to be decimated and tortured by the Japanese, was in the midst of it all. He held great sway with West Point, having graduated first in his class in 1903. Later as superintendent he made it a priority to increase the level of its sports programs. Given his popularity and pain-in-the-ass prickliness and flash-flood indignance when he perceived phantom insult and his presidential aspirations, the top command and administration were terrified of MacArthur,

By the spring of 1941, there was no longer any doubt that America was gearing up for war. In March, Roosevelt announced Lend-Lease aid to Great Britain, and in May, he declared a state of “unlimited national emergency.” Such support for Great Britain did nothing to ease American relations with Japan. In July, determined to stop further Japanese expansion beyond Indochina, the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands acted in concert to shut off the flow of raw materials upon which the Japanese war machine relied. The three countries instituted an embargo against Japan of oil, steel, and other strategic imports. Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in the United States, closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping, and recalled Major General Douglas MacArthur to active duty to defend the Philippines. Far from slowing Japan’s war-making capabilities, these actions, particularly the oil embargo, served only to increase the urgency Japan felt to subjugate China and gobble up oil and rubber from the East Indies. By