Prisoners of History
If America does not understand Europe, it is because America never suffered as Europe or Asia did. The vast majority of Americans only ever experienced the war through the images brought home by film units and war photographers, which did not always give the most truthful or complete picture of what was taking place. Some of the most famous American monuments to the war are based on these photographs, and it is no wonder that they portray a rather idealistic view.
If Europe does not understand America, however, it is for very different reasons. Europeans have failed to grasp the fact that American depth of feeling about the war comes not from a sense of history, but from a sense of identity. The war is nothing but a screen upon which they have projected much deeper ideas and emotions that are right at the heart of the American psyche. In other words, when public figures in America wax lyrical about the war, they aren’t really talking about the war at all. This, as we shall see, is obvious as soon as one takes a closer look at their war memorials.
One of the best-loved monuments to American heroism during the Second World War is the Marine Corps memorial in Arlington, Virginia. It stands at the very heart of American power, not far from the Pentagon building, with an unrestricted view across the Potomac River to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the US Capitol. It is undeniably one of the most important monuments in the country.
Strictly speaking, this isn’t a Second World War memorial at all – it is a memorial to all the marines who have fallen since the formation of the corps in 1775. But it was built in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and paid for by donations from marines who had served during that war. Furthermore, it is based on one of the most iconic images from 1945 – Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the moment when a group of marines raised a flag on Mount Suribachi during the battle for the island of Iwo Jima.
The memorial depicts six soldiers, their weapons slung over their shoulders, standing on a patch of jagged, unforgiving ground. Like all the statues we have seen so far they are colossal – more than five times taller than an average man. The figure at the front of the group leans forward, his body almost horizontal, using all his weight to drive a gigantic flagpole into the ground. Those behind him are hunched together, trying also to lend their weight to the task. At the back of the group, one of the marines stretches upwards, his fingers not quite reaching the pole. Beneath them, on the black granite plinth, are Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz’s words summing up the performance of the Marines at Iwo Jima, ‘Uncommon valor was a common virtue’.
Like all good memorials, this one tells a story. However, it is a story with many layers, and to understand it properly, one needs to go right back to the beginning of the conflict.
America’s war began on 7 December 1941 when the Japanese launched their notorious attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. This remains one of the defining events of American history. For ninety minutes, hundreds of Japanese planes bombed American ships, airfields and port facilities, killing more than 2,400 people and wounding almost 1,200 more. Twenty-one ships were sunk, and 188 military aircraft destroyed. The attack came as a complete surprise, because the US Secretary of State did not receive a declaration of war until after it had begun. The sense of shock that this produced in American society is impossible to overstate. Its only recent parallel has been the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
The logic behind this military strike was simple. Japan wanted to take control of the whole Pacific region, and knew that in order to do so they would have to discourage America from stepping in. The Japanese leadership did not think that America had the stomach for a long war in the Pacific, and were willing to gamble that a quick, decisive victory would force them to negotiate a settlement. In other words, Pearl Harbor was not supposed to start a war with America; it was supposed to prevent one.
Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of US history could have told them that this was a risky strategy. America never gives up without a fight. Once they had recovered from their initial surprise, the American military responded with ruthless determination. Over the next three and a half years it clawed its way, step by step, back across the Pacific Ocean. It fought huge naval battles in the Coral Sea and at Midway; it launched submarine strikes against Japanese supply lines; it liberated one island group after another.
The Marines were often at the forefront of the action. The battles they fought to secure Guadalcanal, Tarawa, the Marshall Islands, the Mariana Islands and Palau were some of the most brutal of the whole war. At this time, Japanese soldiers were considered notorious for their viciousness and their refusal to surrender, and inflicted terrible casualties on the less experienced Americans. Before long, the US Marines began repaying them in kind, taking few prisoners, and occasionally massacring them after they had been disarmed. Reports and photographs of atrocities by either side rarely made it back home to America, because US censors wished to spare the public both the anguish and the shame of what was really going on.
Eventually, US forces advanced all the way to the shores of Japan. The first island they reached was Iwo Jima. After four days of savage fighting, a group of marines managed to fight their way to the top of Mount Suribachi, the highest point of the island. To signal that they had reached the summit, they attached a US flag to a length of piping and raised it. Later that day, a second group of marines brought a larger flag up to replace it, and war photographer Joe Rosenthal was there to capture the moment for posterity.
It is this second flag-raising that the Marine Corps Memorial immortalises in bronze. The sculpture is a study in determination. The effort required to plant the flag is plain to see: each one of the six figures appears to be straining every sinew. They are the personification of American grit. The sculpture is also a study in unity: these Americans are all working together in harmony, their hands placed along the same pole, their legs bent in parallel with one another. It is a study in violence – more so, perhaps, than any other American monument to the war. No Japanese soldiers are being killed here, but the force with which the six men are driving the flag into hostile foreign ground is at least suggestive of something darker, which the US censor never allowed the American people to see.
Most of all, however, this is a study in vengeance. The story that begins with Pearl Harbor ends with American troops raising their flag on Japanese soil. In this sense, it is as stark a warning as the statue of the Motherland in Volgograd: this is what happens to anyone who dares attack America.
All these qualities would have been keenly felt by those who stood before the memorial when it was first unveiled in November 1954. Three of the men depicted in the sculpture were present at the inauguration ceremony, as were the mothers of the other three, who had been killed shortly after Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph was taken. They and the 5,000 other attendees, many of whom had direct experience of the Pacific War, would have had good cause to nurture some of the darker emotions inspired by the monument.
But vengeance and grim determination are not qualities that explain the reverence with which the majority of Americans regard this monument. The thousands of people who come each week to pay their respects, or to watch one of the sunset parades that are performed in front of the monument during the summer months, are not here to celebrate violence. There is clearly something else going on.
To understand this, one must move one’s gaze from the figures at the front of the monument to those at the back. These men are not driving a spike into the soil, they are reaching their hands up, as if to heaven. Above them flies the US flag. The figure right at the back is trying to touch the flagpole, his outstretched fingers not quite reaching it. The effect is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s famous painting of Adam stretching his hand towards God in the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
Felix de Weldon, the artist who sculpted the memorial, explained the image in a speech at the inauguration in 1954. ‘The hands of these men reaching out,’ he said, are ‘groping for that which may be beyond one’s means to attain, needing assistance from the power above, that power which we all need in time of adversity, and without whose guidance our efforts might well be fruitless.’ This divine guidance is symbolised by the flag above them, which de Weldon called ‘the emblem of our unity, our power, our thoughts and purpose as a nation’.
In other words, the real subject of the sculpture is not the US Marines at all, nor the victory over the Japanese, nor anything else to do with the Second World War. It is the flag which gives the monument its real meaning. This symbol, with its fusion of God and nation, is the real reason why the memorial is so well loved in America.
If there is a gulf of understanding between Europeans and Americans over the memory of the Second World War, then this is one of the issues that lies at the heart of it. Europe and America learned very different lessons from the war. In the 1930s Europe was exposed to all the dangers of flag-waving. In the violent years that followed it experienced firsthand what happens when fanatical nationalism is allowed to get out of control. As a consequence, flags today are symbols that must be treated with great care. In post-war, post-colonial Europe, anyone who shows excessive passion towards their national flag is generally treated with suspicion. The idea of a monument glorifying the planting of a national flag on foreign soil would be absolutely unthinkable.
In the USA, by contrast, flags are everywhere: outside courtrooms, outside schools and government buildings, in public parks, outside people’s homes, on their cars, adorning their clothes. The national anthem, which is nothing less than a hymn to the flag, is sung before every NFL football game; and the pledge of allegiance to the flag is recited by every child from the moment they are old enough to attend school. This has been the case since long before the Second World War; but the war cemented the holy bond between Americans and their flag.
What Europeans fail to understand is that, to most Americans, the flag means much more than mere nationhood. It is a symbol of virtues they believe to be universal: hope, freedom, justice and democracy. Between 1941 and 1945, Americans watched the progress of their flag across Europe and the Pacific, saw liberation spreading in its wake, and knew that they were doing something remarkable. After the war they were magnanimous to those they had defeated, nursing their economies back to health, and quickly handing them back their independence. This is the final meaning of the Iwo Jima memorial: when an American soldier plants a flag on foreign soil it is not an act of domination, but of liberation.
Americans understand this instinctively. That is why, since 1945, America has paraded its flag so proudly in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Somalia and Afghanistan. It is why, during the liberation of Baghdad in 2003, a modern marine climbed the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square and wrapped a US flag around his face. Americans believe passionately in the values they promote, which are no different from the values for which they fought the Second World War.
Unfortunately, other parts of the world see things rather differently. As we shall see next, however glorious an American flag seems when flown in the USA, it begins to look very different when planted on foreign soil.
4
USA and the Philippines: Douglas MacArthur Landing Memorial, Leyte
Just as the Soviets had monuments erected in their honour in other countries after the war, so too did the Americans. There are several in western Europe, most famously in Normandy near the beaches where the Allies landed on D-Day. There are also several in the Pacific, in places like Guadalcanal and Papua New Guinea, which saw some of the most vicious fighting of the war.
Unlike the Soviets, however, the Americans did not impose their own visions of glory upon the nations that they liberated. They did not seize positions on hill tops and in town squares, so that their monuments would dominate the urban landscape. On the whole, they confined their memorials to the cemeteries where US servicemen lay buried. As a consequence, American monuments have never aroused the same animosity that monuments to the Soviets have: what nation could possibly object to their liberators paying quiet tribute to their dead?
Every now and then, however, a different kind of monument to American heroism is raised on foreign soil, and things suddenly become much more controversial.
One such monument can be found in the municipality of Palo, on the coast of Leyte in the Philippines. It consists of seven statues, standing in a pool of water near the shore. They are larger-than-life representations of the American officers and aides who led the liberation of the country from the Japanese in 1944. Among them is the Filipino president of the time, Sergio Osmeña – but he is not the main figure. Standing front and centre, taller than all the others, is the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces for the South West Pacific Area, General Douglas MacArthur. He stands upright, chest out, shoulders back, as he strides purposefully towards the shore. His eyes are hidden behind dark glasses, but it is clear that his gaze is fixed on the land he is liberating.
The Douglas MacArthur Landing Memorial is based on a photograph that was taken on this very coastline in 1944 when its liberators first waded ashore. Like most monuments devoted to American soldiers, it represents a variety of heroic virtues: perseverance, bravery, goodness, redemption, victory. Unlike most other monuments, however, it locates those virtues not in a generic hero or American everyman, but in a real-life historical figure. And not just any figure: Douglas MacArthur was one of the most controversial generals of the war.
Had the Americans themselves erected this memorial, it would have raised a few eyebrows. But the fact that it was commissioned and paid for by the Filipino government is even more interesting. No other monument says more than this one about the fallibility of American heroes, or how they are viewed by the nations they liberated.
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‘I have returned’: Gaetano Faillace’s famous photograph of MacArthur striding ashore at Leyte in 1944
Douglas MacArthur was a towering figure in the history of both the Philippines and the US Army. His father was military governor of the islands during their first days as a US colony, and MacArthur himself served there several times, first as a junior officer and later as commander. In the mid-1930s he was appointed field marshal of the Philippine Army – the first and only American ever to have held this rank. But what would make him truly famous, and indeed infamous, was the role that he played here and in other parts of Asia during and after the Second World War.
MacArthur’s war began on the morning of 8 December 1941, when the Japanese attacked the Philippines just a few hours after they had struck Pearl Harbor. MacArthur, who had only recently been put in charge of all US Army forces in the Far East, was taken completely by surprise. Most of his planes were destroyed on the ground before they even had a chance to take off. Soon his coastal defences on Luzon were also overwhelmed, and his troops were forced to fall back in disarray.
They retreated to the Bataan peninsula, a mountainous stretch of jungle just across the bay from Manila, where they hoped to hold out until help arrived from the US Navy. But that help never came. For three and a half months MacArthur’s men fought a series of desperate skirmishes against the Japanese with barely enough food and supplies to sustain them. Eventually they could hold out no longer. At the beginning of April 1942, around 80,000 starving men gave themselves up to the Japanese. Over the next two weeks at least 5,000 would die on an infamous ‘death march’ to internment camps in the north of the island. Thousands more were to die in squalid conditions as they waited out the rest of the war in captivity.
MacArthur himself escaped this fate at the last minute. Under the cover of night, he and a few key staff boarded a handful of patrol torpedo boats on the island of Corregidor and fled south to Mindanao. From here they caught one of the last flights out of the Philippines to safety in Australia.
Almost as soon as he arrived on Australian soil, MacArthur announced his determination to redeem himself. ‘I shall return,’ he told reporters on the station platform while he was changing trains at Terowie in South Australia. Over the next two and a half years he devoted himself to fulfilling this promise. Building up a force of eighteen American divisions, he fought desperate battles in Papua New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands. Gradually he clawed his way north towards the Philippines.
His return was just as dramatic as his escape. On 20 October 1944, backed up by the power of the US Seventh Fleet, MacArthur began landing 200,000 men on the island of Leyte. While the battle was still raging, MacArthur himself boarded one of the landing boats and headed towards the shore. When it hit ground a few yards from the shoreline, he and his staff stepped down into the water and waded through the surf. The sound of small arms fire could be heard all around them, but MacArthur continued to walk fearlessly up onto the beach.
In the following days, a photograph of him striding through the waves would make front pages all over the world, accompanied by gushing articles which sang his praises to the skies. ‘The successful Philippines invasion is more than a great military victory, it is a personal triumph for MacArthur,’ announced one Australian newspaper. ‘With a crusader’s zeal and singleness of purpose rarely encountered, he concentrated everything into redeeming his pledge to the Filipino nation and to the haggard, battleworn Americans overrun on Bataan and Corregidor.’
MacArthur himself seemed to sense the huge historical importance of the moment. After he had waded ashore, he made his way to a radio and broadcast an extraordinary speech full of religious imagery. ‘To the people of the Philippines,’ he announced, ‘I have returned … The hour of your redemption is here … Rally to me! … The guidance of divine God points the way. Follow in His name to the Holy Grail of righteous victory!’
This is the story told by the memorial that stands on the beach today. It depicts an American hero: compassionate but tough, determined not to give up on a desperate cause, unafraid to get his hands dirty, or his shoes wet, in the pursuit of liberating his people. Symbolically speaking, MacArthur is America. He is shown here bestowing upon the Philippines the most precious gift that America had to offer – the gift of freedom. But he is more than America, too: he is a father returning to save his children, a shepherd returning to save his flock. Looking at the memorial today, there is more than a touch of the Messiah about the way that he and his disciples stand in their pool of water: they appear to be walking on top of the water rather than wading through it. Behind them is nothing but sea and sky: it is as if they have descended not from a landing craft but from heaven itself.
Most memorials endow a kind of mythical power to the events of the past – that’s the whole point of them. But imbuing a real historical figure with such qualities is a dangerous game. No man can possibly live up to such ideals, let alone a man as flamboyantly flawed as Douglas MacArthur.
There are other ways of telling the story which are not nearly so flattering to MacArthur. Many historians believe that his leadership, particularly at the beginning of the war, was greatly overrated. Why were his men not prepared for an attack? Why was their retreat to Bataan such a shambles? And why did he take such credit for the return to the Philippines, when it was only the victories of commanders in other branches of the military – particularly the US Navy – that made it possible?
Far from being the selfless, moral paragon of contemporary news stories, MacArthur is often accused of carelessness towards his men. At the beginning of the war, while his troops were starving on Bataan, he set up his command post on the well-stocked and well-fortified island of Corregidor. Records show that he only visited his beleaguered men on the mainland once. Embittered by his absence, they began calling him ‘Dugout Doug’, and composed disparaging songs about him, sung to the tune of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’:
Dugout Doug, come out from hiding
Dugout Doug, come out from hiding
Give to Franklin the glad tidings
That his troops go starving on!
The care he took of civilian lives was not always exemplary either. During the landings at Palo he ruthlessly shelled the coastline, regardless of the civilians who lived there: it was only thanks to an American spy called Charles Parsons that local residents evacuated the area before the bombardment began. Later on in the campaign, MacArthur’s forces bombarded Manila so comprehensively that by the end there was little left to liberate: around 100,000 Filipinos are thought to have been killed, and the historic heart of the city was reduced to rubble. When viewed from this perspective, MacArthur’s record is not nearly as admirable as it at first appears.
If MacArthur was an exceptional military leader, he was also a highly narcissistic one. It was not mere chance that made the photograph of MacArthur wading ashore so famous: he himself gave it a helping hand. The picture was taken by his personal photographer, Gaetano Faillace, and promoted by his personal team of public relations officers. This team was notorious for stretching the truth in order to make the general look good. They often pretended that MacArthur was at the front with his men when he was actually hundreds of miles away in the comfort of Australia. They gave him credit for other people’s successes, much to the chagrin of the US Navy, the Marine Corps, and even his own subordinates. According to George Kenny, MacArthur’s air force chief, ‘unless a news release painted the General with a halo and seated him on the highest pedestal in the universe, it should be killed.’
After his death, questions also began to arise about MacArthur’s moral character. In a groundbreaking article in the Pacific Historical Review, historian Carol Petillo revealed that the general had accepted a mysterious payment from the pre-war president of the Philippines, Manuel Quezon, of half a million dollars. The payment was made in the desperate days of early 1942, when Filipino leaders like Quezon were scrambling to escape falling into the hands of the Japanese. MacArthur had already told Washington that he was not willing to rescue Quezon; but after he received the money, Quezon was indeed evacuated. Most historians would stop short of suggesting that the money was a bribe to get MacArthur to change his mind; but all agree that there is something distasteful about an American leader accepting such a huge sum of money during the darkest days of the war, when his own men, just a few miles away on the Bataan peninsula, were starving.
Once one knows all this about Douglas MacArthur, is it possible to look at the memorial in the same way? The monument was supposed to celebrate the virtues of bravery, perseverance and morality, but what if it inadvertently celebrated a different set of qualities – vanity, arrogance and corruption? And what if these qualities also ended up being identified, via MacArthur, with America?