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Episode Title: I Shall Return — MacArthur, the Philippines, and The Decision to Leave

Season 3, Episode 3 — The Decisions That Shaped the Western War

At nine forty-five in the evening on March 11th, 1942, four PT boats slipped away from the dock at Corregidor Island and headed south into Japanese-controlled waters.

On board were General Douglas MacArthur, his wife, his four-year-old son, and thirteen members of his staff.

On Bataan, twenty miles to the north, approximately seventy-eight thousand Filipino and American soldiers were holding a defensive line on half rations. They were sick with malaria. Their ammunition was running low. Reinforcements had been promised and had not arrived. They had a name for the general who had visited them in the field exactly once since January.

They called him Dugout Doug.

MacArthur reached Australia and stood before the press. He told them: I came through and I shall return. Washington wanted him to say "we shall return." He said "I" and he meant it. Two and a half years later, he waded ashore at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines — staging the landing three times until the cameras got it right — and spoke into a radio microphone: "I have returned."

The story of Douglas MacArthur is the story of a man who cannot be held in a single frame. He was a genuine military genius whose Pacific campaign strategy shortened the war. He was also the commander who lost most of his air force on the ground at Clark Field — nine hours after Pearl Harbor, with full warning that war had begun, his aircraft were still parked in rows when the Japanese arrived. He visited the men fighting on Bataan once in three months. He accepted a secret payment of five hundred thousand dollars from Philippine President Manuel Quezon while those men were dying — a payment not discovered until a Boston College professor found it in MacArthur's chief of staff's papers in 1979, fifteen years after MacArthur's death. Dwight Eisenhower was offered the same payment. He refused.

MacArthur received the Medal of Honor for the Philippines campaign. The citation was written by MacArthur himself.

In this episode Amanda and Harry examine the full MacArthur — the promise kept and the men left behind, the genius and the failures, the legend and what the record actually shows. Season Three of WWII Unwound examines the decisions that shaped the Western — and Pacific — war. This one begins in darkness on the water and ends on a beach in the Philippines with a general wading through the surf toward a waiting camera.

Both versions of Douglas MacArthur are true. This episode holds them both.