Talk:American Caesar

Untitled

We are proposing amending the existing article to reflect historical information at variance with the story as told by the author.

In his narrative, Author William Manchester paints the reader a picture of a man very important to the character development of young Douglas MacArthur; his grandfather, Arthur MacArthur, a hero of the Battle of Missionary Ridge, near Chattanooga, Tennessee in the Civil War.

In this scene, Manchester (p 13) places the Confederate defenders atop the ridge, “then a tangle of rock, thick kudzu vines, pine and oak,” in a terrain difficult to walk through. In fact, there was no Kudzu in Tennessee during the Civil War, nor likely anywhere else in America, at that time. Kudzu was first introduced in America in 1876, and was not widely planted throughout the south until after the turn of the 20th century.

Elsewhere, Manchester devotes a page (278) to woes befalling the Allied forces due to ignorance of maps, knowledge of geography, and pure bad luck. And he repeats an apparently favorite theme of his – that “the more beautiful the flora was, the more dangerous the landings turned out to be.” He continues, “some islands were literally uninhabitable – Army engineers sent to survey the Santa Cruz group for airstrips were virtually wiped out by cerebral malaria…” While that may exactly be true, it does not tell the entire story – that whatever the Army’s failures were there, the Navy built a float plane base at Graciosa Bay on Santa Cruz Island and operated it for some time while the forces were active in the area, a fact that apparently escaped Manchester’s research. While it is true that malaria is endemic on Santa Cruz and other islands in the area, all the larger islands are and have been inhabited for hundreds of years, and their populations cope with the malarial threat.

One of Manchester’s main themes throughout the book is the tension and competition between Army and Navy forces around MacArthur. We trust this was not an example of the author forgetting to tell us “the rest of the story.”

Hopefully, this type of errata is not reflective of the myriad of detail on the organization and execution of the American war effort, nor on Manchester's conclusions about General MacArthur.

We would appreciate the opinions of the related editors...

vincekoersVince (talk) 23:46, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

vincekoersVince (talk) 09:07, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on American Caesar. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20040715143905/http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19790601fabook13917/william-manchester/american-caesar-douglas-macarthur-1880-1964.html to http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19790601fabook13917/william-manchester/american-caesar-douglas-macarthur-1880-1964.html
• Added {{dead link}} tag to http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewpdf.cfm?article_id=6074

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

• If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
• If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 12:34, 2 January 2018 (UTC)