General Douglas MacArthur's storied career is inextricably linked to Asia. His father, Arthur, served as Military Governor of the Philippines while Douglas was a student at West Point, and the younger MacArthur would serve several tours of duty in that country over the next four decades, becoming friends with several influential Filipinos, including the country's future president, Emanuel L. Quezon. In 1935, he became Quezon's military advisor, a post he held after retiring from the U.S. Army and at the time of Japan's invasion of 1941. As Supreme Commander for the Southwest Pacific, MacArthur led American forces throughout the Pacific War. He officially accepted Japan's surrender in 1945 and would later oversee the Allied occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1951. He then led the UN Command in the Korean War from 1950 to 1951, until he was dismissed from his post by President Truman. In MacArthur in Asia, the distinguished Japanese historian Hiroshi Masuda offers a new perspective on the American icon, focusing on his experiences in the Philippines, Japan, and Korea and highlighting the importance of the general's staff-the famous "Bataan Boys" who served alongside MacArthur throughout the Asian arc of his career-to both MacArthur's and the region's history. First published to wide acclaim in Japanese in 2009 and translated into English for the first time, this book uses a wide range of sources-American and Japanese, official records and oral histories-to present a complex view of MacArthur, one that illuminates his military decisions during the Pacific campaign and his administration of the Japanese Occupation.

A new narrative and analytic history of the twenty U.S. Army divisions that fought in the Pacific War. Despite the prevailing view that the Marine Corps bore the brunt of the fighting in the Pacific War, the men of the US Army played a decisive role in the conflict. Indeed, GIs did most of the war’s heavy lifting on the ground by conducting more amphibious assaults and prosecuting more operations than the Marines. By the end of the war there were 1.77 million U.S. Army troops in the Pacific and Asia, compared to the USMC’s 484,000. The Pacific was as much the Army’s war as the fighting in the European theater. The U.S. Army deployed twenty combat divisions to fight in the Pacific, including famous ones such as the 1st Cavalry Division and the 25th “Tropic Lightning” Division. Most were infantry, and included Regular, National Guard and draftee divisions. The divisions were deployed and maneuvered by theater, field army, and corps commanders around the Pacific’s geostrategic chessboard to battle and defeat the Japanese. The Army may have wanted its divisions to be interchangeable and uniform, but this proved impossible. Their quality and performance depended upon their resources, the geography and terrain on which they fought, experience, leadership, and organizational culture. Historians, though, have made little effort to examine their records in a systematic way before now. In addition, almost all of the Army’s divisions, some after admittedly rocky starts, became units capable of winning their engagements. Indeed, not a single Army division fighting the Japanese during the American counteroffensive across the Pacific was completely destroyed in combat. Whatever problems these divisions faced tended to grow out of the society that produced them, not fundamental flaws in Army doctrine. This is a tribute to the Army as a whole and to the twenty divisions that the Army deployed against the Japanese. This new history uses a narrative approach to describe and analyze each division's history, characteristics, and battles during the conflict, concluding with an assessment of their battlefield records, taking into account the innumerable factors affecting their combat performance.

A forgotten account, written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, which vividly portrays the valor, sacrifice, suffering, and liberation of the defenders of Bataan and Corregidor through the eyes of one survivor. The personal memoir of Colonel David L. Hardee, first drafted at sea from April-May 1945 following his liberation from Japanese captivity, is a thorough treatment of his time in the Philippines. A career infantry officer, Hardee fought during the Battle of Bataan as executive officer of the Provisional Air Corps Regiment. Captured in April 1942 after the American surrender on Bataan, Hardee survived the Bataan Death March and proceeded to endure a series of squalid prison camps. A debilitating hernia left Hardee too ill to travel to Japan in 1944, making him one of the few lieutenant colonels to remain in the Philippines and subsequently survive the war. As a primary account written almost immediately after his liberation, Hardee’s memoir is fresh, vivid, and devoid of decades of faded memories or contemporary influences associated with memoirs written years after an experience. This once-forgotten memoir has been carefully edited, illustrated and annotated to unlock the true depths of Hardee’s experience as a soldier, prisoner, and liberated survivor of the Pacific War.

Military obligations rested lightly upon the Filipino people for much of the period that America occupied the Philippines, but Filipinos could enlist in the United States Army and Navy, attend the service academies at West Point and Annapolis, or join military organizations restricted to duty in the islands such as the Philippine Scouts, Philippine Constabulary, Philippine National Guard, and the navy's insular force. In the 1930s, the Philippine government established its own armed forces. Throughout much of this time, the U.S. army also kept a substantial portion of its troop strength in the Philippines. This annotated bibliography of nearly 700 titles highlights the extent and variety of the Philippine-American military experience from the conquest of the islands by the United States in 1902 to the defeat of Philippine and American forces by the Japanese in 1942. The bibliography includes memoirs and biographies of Filipino and American officers and enlisted men (from MacArthur to Ferdinand Marcos), unit histories, army post and navy base histories, medals and insignia books, and the most extensive list of prisoner-of-war memoirs yet published. Annotations address controversies such as the widely disparate estimates of American deaths on the Bataan Death March and include previously unpublished information, such as casualty figures for American and Philippine forces in 1941-1942.