Victory left a giant power vacuum in Asia. Our only rival was the Russians. If we failed to exploit this vacuum effectively, it’s because we’re Americans. We never exploit victory effectively.

The Soviets were seen as a faithful ally because enormous numbers of useful idiots in our government saw communism as the future. Some were playing the game of trading dead Russians for living Americans with open eyes but, due to the ordinary American’s need for a semblance of pretense, the Roosevelt Administration went out of its way, aided by the useful idiots, to convince the American people that kindly Uncle Joe and his merry men were our kind of people.

I’m still having trouble grokking how we saw the Soviets as a faithful ally in both Asia and Europe. Like Buckethead, I’m inclined toward the send-Patton-to-finish-the-Reds point of view.

But that doesn’t make MacArthur the greatest, either. Patton was in my view the greatest American general of WWII. Off the top of my head, Winfield Scott and Sherman were both much better. As was most of the top leadership of the Confederate forces, though whether you can count them is debatable.

I think Fouche has it nailed, there. The SW campaign was a waste of effort. The leapfrogging strategy should have been pursued to its logical conclusion. Forestalling further Japanese advances towards Australia would have been sufficient.

The results Foseti mentions in regard to the war in Europe could likely have been — if not avoided — mitigated had Patton’s leash been lengthened. Every time Patton got the Germans running, Bradley cut off his logistics.

Japan almost didn’t accept defeat. Elements of the Japanese army tried to launch a coup hours before Hirohito’s surrender message was broadcast. Only a timely blackout as B-29s passed by on their way to bomb an oil refinery in northern Japan disrupted the coup. Japanese air defense officials were afraid the B-29 formation was going to drop an atom bomb on Tokyo.

As for MacArthur’s supposed long-range vision, it holds true for Japan. However, the Philippines was going to receive its independence anyway. Formosa was assumed to be under the control of the friendly Nationalist government on the mainland and not a factor. Even if the collapse of the Nationalist cause on the mainland was forseen, there was no guarantee that Formosa would have been their last redoubt and that the Red Chinese wouldn’t have taken it. The same logic that called for keeping the Soviets and Red Chinese out of the Japanese and Philippine archipelagos and the island of Formosa also apply to the islands of Hainan and Sakhalin and the Kurile and Dutch East Indies archipelagos. I see no evidence that anyone at the time was pushing for the occupation of those islands. We eventually moved Indonesia into our column, but only as an extension of our overall effort in Southeast Asia. On the mainland.

Mark Clark, for example, lost more people taking useless territory in Italy. Read my review — criticizing MacArthur for the number of lives lost is ridiculous. By that standard he’d be better than any general that fought the Nazis and virtually all Union generals of the Civil War.

Setting this aside, I think you’re missing a critical, bigger point. MacArthur was not fighting solely to beat the Japanese. He was fighting for the US to win in the Pacific.

To do this, he believed the US needed to have strong influence in the Philippines, Taiwan and Japan. Then, the US was to keep its army off the Asian mainland. (If you wonder why he picked these three island, look at a map).

MacArthur’s strategy for beating the Japanese included winning the loyalty of the Taiwanese and the Filipinos and, eventually, the Japanese (the latter required actually beating the Japanese in war). By any standard, this plan was incredibly successful. The US still reaps the rewards of his foresight.

Truman ignored his desire to stay off the mainland in Korea (and later other Presidents ignored his advice in Vietnam), but MacArthur would easily have won the war if the US had actually decided to try to win instead of trying to avoid offending/fighting Chinese. Despite these screw ups, the Pacific has been remarkably peaceful given the rise of such great powers in recent decades (thanks to MacArthur, I’d argue).

Contrast this to the generals in Europe. To “win” in Europe, the US had to sell-out half the continent into Bolshevik slavery and begin a 50 year Cold War. God help us if we get any more “victories” like the one in Europe.

I’ll grant that it may have been possible to “beat” the Japanese in an easier way, by deferring to Nimitz. But this victory would have been like the early US victories over the Taliban and Saddam. After a victory under Nimitz’s strategy, the Japanese would not have accepted defeat, the Philippines would have been in constant rebellion and Chi-coms would have believed they could walk all over the US.

Sometimes to win a war, you actually have to fight a war.