Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964: A Most Successful and Unusual Military Leader
He commanded Allied forces in the southwest Pacific during World War Two. Transcript of radio broadcast:
22 May 2009
ANNOUNCER:
Now, the VOA Special English program PEOPLE IN AMERICA. Today Rich Kleinfeldt and Sarah Long tell about one of the most unusual and successful American military leaders, General Douglas MacArthur.
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VOICE ONE:
General Douglas MacArthur was a most unusual man. He was extremely intelligent and very demanding. He expected his orders to be followed exactly. Yet he had problems all his life following the orders of those who were his commanders.
Douglas MacArthur was very intelligent and could remember things that others would easily forget. He could design battle plans that left the enemy no choice other than surrender and defeat. His battle plans defeated the enemy and saved as many of his own men as possible.
At other times, he would make simple mistakes that made him appear stupid. He often said things that showed he felt important. Many people made jokes about him. Some of his soldiers sang songs that made fun of him. Others believed he was the best general ever to serve in the United States military.
General Douglas MacArthur was extremely brave in battle, sometimes almost foolish. It often seemed as if he believed he could not be killed. He won every medal and honor the United States can give a soldier. However, at the end of his life, he rejected war and warned American political leaders to stay away from armed conflict.
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VOICE TWO:
Douglas MacArthur was born to be a soldier. His father, Arthur MacArthur, was a hero of the American Civil War and continued to serve in the army after the war ended in eighteen sixty-five. He became the top officer of the army in nineteen-oh-six.
Douglas was born on an Army base near the southern city of Little Rock, Arkansas in January, eighteen eighty. He grew up on army bases where his father served. He said the first sounds he could remember as a child were those of the Army: the sounds of horns, drums and soldiers marching.
VOICE ONE:
There was never any question about what Douglas MacArthur would do with his life. He would join the army. He wanted to enter the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.
The Academy is a university that trains officers for the United States Army. School officials rejected him two times before he was accepted. He finished his four years at West Point as the best student in his class.
VOICE TWO:
Douglas MacArthur began his service in the Army by traveling to several Asian countries including Japan, and to the Philippines, then an American territory. He also served at several small bases in the United States. He became a colonel when World War One began. He led troops on very dangerous attacks against the enemy. He won many honors for his bravery and leadership. After that war, he served as head of the West Point Military Academy.
He became a general. During the nineteen thirties, President Herbert Hoover appointed him chief of staff of the Army, one of the most important jobs in the American military.
In nineteen thirty-five, General MacArthur was appointed military advisor to the Philippines. He was to help the government build an army for defense purposes as the Philippines began planning for independence. He had retired from the army. He was the chief military advisor to the Philippine military forces when the United States entered World War Two in December, nineteen forty-one.
VOICE ONE:
Japanese aggression in the Pacific developed very quickly. Japanese troops began arriving in the Philippines on December eleventh, nineteen forty-one. The fighting was extremely fierce.
The Japanese were defeating the Philippine and American forces. General MacArthur had been recalled to active duty by President Franklin Roosevelt. President Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to leave the Philippines to command American forces in the South Pacific. General MacArthur finally agreed to leave for Australia before the Philippines surrendered to Japan. But he made a promise to the Philippine people. He said, “I shall return.”
VOICE TWO:
Military history experts continue to study General MacArthur’s decisions during World War Two. He won battle after battle in the South Pacific area. Often, he would pass islands with strong enemy forces, cut off their supplies and leave them with no chance to fight. In nineteen forty-four, he returned to the Philippines with an army that defeated the Japanese.
VOICE ONE
General MacArthur accepts the Japanese surrender ending the war in the Pacific
MacArthur was chosen to accept the Japanese surrender in September, nineteen forty-five. He was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, the leader of the occupation forces that would rule Japan. As an American soldier, he had to follow the orders of the government in Washington. But in Japan, General MacArthur ruled like a dictator.
VOICE TWO:
The Japanese expected severe punishment. They saw MacArthur as a very conservative ruler who would make Japan suffer.
MacArthur did charge some Japanese leaders with war crimes. But he did not try to punish the Japanese people.
General MacArthur told the Japanese they must change, both politically and socially. He began with education. Before the war, female children in Japan received little if any education. MacArthur said education would be for everyone, including girls and women.
He said women must have the right to vote in elections, and be permitted to hold political office. He said Japanese women would now have the same legal rights as men. And he said that every person had the same legal protection under the law.
VOICE ONE:
General MacArthur told the Japanese people they were now free to form political parties. And he ended the idea of an official government religion. Religion would be a matter of individual choice. He also said the Japanese government would no longer be controlled by a few powerful people.
MacArthur told Japan it would now be ruled by a parliament that was freely elected by the people. He helped the people of Japan write a new constitution for a democratic form of government.
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VOICE TWO:
On June twenty-fifth, nineteen fifty, North Korean troops invaded South Korea. Within two days, the United States decided to send armed forces to aid South Korea.
Douglas MacArthur was appointed commander of the United Nations forces in South Korea. As the weeks passed, the North Korean army forced the South Korean army and its allies to retreat to the southern city of Pusan.
Many military experts said South Korea was lost. General MacArthur did not agree. He wanted to attack from the sea, deep behind the enemy troops at the city of Inchon. MacArthur said the enemy would not be prepared. Most other military leaders believed this would be extremely dangerous. American Marines did attack Inchon September fifteenth. It was a complete success. MacArthur had been right.
VOICE ONE:
General MacArthur often disagreed with political leaders. President Truman warned him several times not to disagree with government policy. General MacArthur continued to disagree and told reporters when he did. He often gave orders that were not approved by the president.
MacArthur called for a total victory in Korea. He wanted to defeat communism in East Asia. He wanted to bomb Chinese bases in Manchuria and block Chinese ports. President Truman and his military advisers were concerned World War Three would start.
In April, nineteen fifty-one, President Truman replaced MacArthur as head of the U.N. forces in Korea. Douglas MacArthur went home to the United States. It was the first time he had been there in more than fifteen years. He was honored as a returning hero. He was invited to speak before Congress. There was a huge parade to honor him in New York City.
VOICE TWO:
General MacArthur retired again. Some political leaders wanted him to compete for some political office, perhaps for president. Instead, he lived a quiet life with his wife and son. He died at the age of eighty-four on April fifth, nineteen sixty-four.
Today, many Americans have forgotten Douglas MacArthur. However, the people of the Philippines built a statue to honor him for keeping his promise to return. And, many Japanese visitors go to General MacArthur’s burial place in Norfolk, Virginia to remember what he did for Japan.
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ANNOUNCER:
This Special English program was written by Paul Thompson. Your narrators were Rich Kleinfeldt and Sarah Long. I’m Shirley Griffith. Listen again next week for another PEOPLE IN AMERICA program on the Voice of America.
Margaret Bourke-White Helped Create Modern Photojournalism
She told her stories with a camera. Transcript of radio broadcast:
14 May 2009
VOICE ONE:
I’m Barbara Klein.
VOICE TWO:
And I’m Steve Ember with People in America in VOA Special English. Today we tell complete our report about photographer Margaret Bourke-White. She helped create the modern art of photojournalism.
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VOICE ONE:
Margaret Bourke-White began her career as an industrial photographer in the early nineteen thirties. Her pictures captured the beauty and power of machines. They told a story – one image at a time. The technique became know as the photographic essay. In nineteen thirty-six, American publisher Henry Luce started a new magazine, called Life, based on the photographic essay. In this magazine, the pictures told the story. Bourke-White had worked as a photographer for one of Luce’s other magazines called Fortune. Luce chose her to work on his new magazine.
VOICE TWO:
Margaret Bourke-White took the picture that appeared on the first cover of Life magazine. It was a picture of a new dam being built in the western state of Montana. The light on the rounded supports showed the dam’s great strength. The small shapes of two men at the bottom showed the dam’s huge size. Bourke-White was no longer satisfied just to show the products of industry in her pictures, as she had in the past. She wanted to tell the story of the people behind the industry: In this case, the people who were building the dam.
VOICE ONE:
The dam in Montana was a federal project. Ten thousand people worked on it. Bourke-White took pictures of those people – at the dam, in the rooms where they lived, and in the places where they had fun. With her pictures in Life magazine, she told a story about America’s “Wild West” in the twentieth century.
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VOICE TWO:
Margaret Bourke-White was a social activist. She was a member of the American Artists Congress. These artists supported state financial aid for the arts. They fought discrimination against African-American artists. And they supported artists fighting against fascism in Europe.
In the nineteen thirties, Bourke-White met the American writer Erskine Caldwell. Caldwell was known for his stories about people in the American South. The photographer and the writer decided to produce a book to tell Americans about some of those poor country people of the South. They traveled through eight states, from South Carolina to Louisiana. Their book, “You Have Seen Their Faces,” was published in nineteen thirty-seven. It was a great success.
Caldwell’s words were beautiful. But Bourke-White’s pictures could have told the story by themselves. They showed the faces of people in a land that still wore the mask of defeat in America’s Civil War.
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Margaret Bourke-White’s photography of Gorky Street in Moscow, Russia
A detail of Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of Gorky Street in Moscow, Russia
VOICE ONE:
In nineteen thirty-eight, some countries in Europe were close to war. Bourke-White and Caldwell went there to report on these events. They produced another book together, this time about Czechoslovakia. It was called “North of the Danube.” The next year Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell were married. They continued to work together.
By the spring of nineteen forty-one, Europe had been at war for a year and a half. Bourke-White and Caldwell went to the Soviet Union. They were the only foreign reporters there. For six weeks, Bourke-White took pictures of the Soviet people preparing for war. Then, one night in July, Soviet officials announced that German bomber planes were flying toward Moscow. No civilians were permitted to stay above ground because of the coming attacks.
VOICE TWO:
As others were hurrying to safety, Bourke-White placed several cameras in the window of her hotel room. She set the cameras so they would remain open to the light of the night sky. Then she joined the others in rooms under the hotel. While she waited for the bombing attack to end, her cameras recorded the explosions, which lit up the rooftops of the city.
Before leaving the country, Bourke-White received permission to meet with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. She returned home with his picture and a series of other photographic essays for Life magazine. She also had enough material for a book on the war in the Soviet Union. Margaret Bourke-White’s marriage to Erskine Caldwell ended in divorce in nineteen forty-two.
VOICE ONE:
During World War Two, she became an official photographer with the United States Army. Her photographs were to be used jointly by the military and by Life magazine. She was the first woman to be permitted to work in combat areas during World War Two.
Bourke-White flew with American bomber planes in England as they prepared to attack enemy targets on the European continent. She wanted to fly with the Army to North Africa, where the allies were fighting German troops in the desert.
But the commanding general told her it would be too dangerous. So she sailed for North Africa instead. Before she reached the African coast, enemy bombs hit the ship and sank it. An allied warship rescued Bourke-White and the other survivors and took them to Algeria.
VOICE TWO:
The incident did not stop Bourke-White from reporting on the war. She flew in an allied bombing attack on a German airfield at El Aouina in Tunisia. She flew over the terrible fighting in the Cassino Valley in Italy. And she moved along the Rhine River with the United States Third Army, under the command of General George Patton. At the end of the war, she was with American troops when they entered and freed several Nazi death camps. She took photographs of the prisoners in the Buchenwald death camp in Germany in nineteen forty-five.
Later, she wrote about the war. She said she sometimes pulled an imaginary cloth across her eyes as she worked. In the death camps, she said, the cloth was so thick that she did not really know what she was photographing until she saw the finished pictures. In addition to her stories for Life magazine, Bourke-White published books on the allied campaign in Italy and on the fall of Nazi Germany.
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VOICE ONE:
After the war, Life magazine sent Margaret Bourke-White to India. She stayed for three years as India prepared for its independence from Britain. She photographed the battles between Muslims and Hindus. And she met with the leader of India’s non-violent campaign for independence, Mohandas Gandhi. She made a famous photograph of him called “Gandhi at His Spinning Wheel.” She was the last person to photograph Gandhi before he was murdered in nineteen forty-eight.
VOICE TWO:
After that, Bourke-White traveled to South Africa. Her job was to tell the story of the black people who worked in the country’s gold mines. To get the pictures she wanted, she followed the workers deep into the mine tunnels.
In the early nineteen fifties, she went to Korea to photograph the effects of war on the Korean people. She took a famous photograph of a returning soldier reunited with his mother in South Korea in nineteen fifty-two. The mother had believed that her son had been killed several months earlier in the Korean War.
VOICE ONE:
Margaret Bourke-White tried to make her pictures perfect. Often, she was not satisfied with what she had done. She would look at her pictures and see something she had failed to do, or something she had not done right. Reaching perfection was not easy. Many things got in the way of her work. She said: “There is only one moment when a picture is there. And a moment later, it is gone forever. My memory is full of those pictures that were lost.”
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VOICE TWO:
More of Margaret Bourke-White’s beautiful pictures were to be lost, sooner than anyone expected. In the middle nineteen fifties, she began to suffer from the effects of Parkinson’s disease.
Her hands shook so badly that she could not hold a camera. She wrote a book about her life, called “Portrait of Myself.” And, even though she was unable to take photographs, she continued to work for Life magazine until nineteen sixty-nine. She died in nineteen seventy-one at the age of sixty-seven.
Margaret Bourke-White was a woman doing what had been a man’s job. Her work took her around the world, from factories to battlefields. Her life was full of adventure. She was one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century.
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VOICE ONE:
This program was written by Shelley Gollust. It was produced by Lawan Davis. I’m Barbara Klein.
VOICE TWO:
And I’m Steve Ember. Join us again next week for People in America in VOA Special English.
Margaret Bourke-White: A Fearless News Photographer
She helped create the modern art of photojournalism. Transcript of radio broadcast:
09 May 2009
VOICE ONE:
I’m Barbara Klein.
VOICE TWO:
And I’m Steve Ember with People in America in VOA Special English. Today we tell about photographer Margaret Bourke-White, one of the leading news reporters of the twentieth century.
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VOICE ONE:
A young woman is sitting on her knees on top of a large metal statue. She is not in a park. She is outside an office building high above New York City. The young woman reached the statue by climbing through a window on the sixty-first floor. She wanted to get a better picture of the city below.
The woman is Margaret Bourke-White. She was one of the leading news reporters of the twentieth century. But she did not write the news. She told her stories with a camera. She was a fearless woman of great energy and skill. Her work took her from America’s Midwest to the Soviet Union. From Europe during World War Two to India, South Africa and Korea. Through her work, she helped create the modern art of photojournalism.
In some ways, Bourke-White was a woman ahead of her time. She often did things long before they became accepted in society. She was divorced. She worked in a world of influential men, and earned their praise and support. She wore trousers and colored her hair. Yet, in more important ways, she was a woman of and for her times. She became involved in the world around her and recorded it in pictures for the future.
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VOICE TWO:
Margaret Bourke-White was born in New York City in nineteen-oh-four. When Margaret was very young, the family moved to New Jersey. Her mother, Minnie Bourke, worked on publications for the blind. Her father, Joseph White, was an engineer and designer in the printing industry. He also liked to take pictures. Their home was filled with his photographs. Soon young Margaret was helping him take and develop his photographs.
When she was eight years old, her father took her inside a factory to watch the manufacture of printing presses. In the foundry, she saw hot liquid iron being poured to make the machines. She remembered this for years to come.
Margaret attended several universities before completing her studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in nineteen twenty-seven. She studied engineering, biology and photography. She married while she was still a student. But the marriage only lasted one year.
VOICE ONE:
Margaret took the name Bourke-White, the last names of her mother and father. In nineteen twenty-eight, she began working in the midwestern city of Cleveland, Ohio. It was then one of the centers of American industry. She became an industrial photographer at the Otis Steel Company. In the hot, noisy factories where steel was made, she saw beauty and a subject for her pictures.
She said: “Industry is alive. The beauty of industry lies in its truth and simpleness. Every line has a purpose, and so is beautiful. Whatever art will come out of this industrial age will come from the subjects of industry themselves…which are close to the heart of the people.”
Throughout America and Europe, engineers and building designers found beauty in technology. Their machines and buildings had artistic forms. In New York, the Museum of Modern Art opened in nineteen twenty-nine. One of its goals was to study the use of art in industry. Bourke-White’s photographic experiments began with the use of industry in art.
VOICE TWO:
Bourke-White’s first pictures inside the steel factory in Cleveland were a failure. The difference between the bright burning metal and the black factory walls was too extreme for her camera. She could not solve the problem until she got new equipment and discovered new techniques of photography. Then she was able to capture the sharp difference between light and dark. The movement and power of machines. The importance of industry.
Sometimes her pictures made you feel you were looking down from a great height, or up from far below. Sometimes they led you directly into the heart of the activity.
VOICE ONE:
In New York, a wealthy and influential publisher named Henry Luce saw Bourke-White’s pictures. Luce published a magazine called Time. He wanted to start a new magazine. It would be called Fortune, and would report about developments in industry. Luce sent a telegram to Bourke-White, asking her to come to New York immediately. She accepted a job as photographer for Fortune magazine. She worked there from nineteen twenty-nine to nineteen thirty-three.
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“Fort Peck Dam, Montana” taken by Margaret Bourke-White in 1936
VOICE TWO:
Margaret Bourke-White told stories in pictures, one image at a time. She used each small image to tell part of the bigger story. The technique became known as the photographic essay. Other magazines and photographers used the technique. But Bourke-White – more than most photographers – had unusual chances to develop it.
VOICE ONE:
In the early nineteen thirties, she traveled to the Soviet Union three times. Later she wrote:
“Nothing invites me so much as a closed door. I cannot let my camera rest until I have opened that door. And I wanted to be first. I believed in machines as objects of beauty. So I felt the story of a nation trying to industrialize – almost overnight – was perfect for me.”
VOICE TWO:
On her first trip to the Soviet Union, Bourke-White traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway. She carried many cameras and examples of her work. When she arrived in Moscow, a Soviet official gave her a special travel permit, because he liked her industrial photographs. The permit ordered all Soviet citizens to help her while she was in the country.
Bourke-White spoke to groups of Soviet writers and photographers. They asked her about camera techniques, and also about her private life.
After one gathering, several men surrounded her and talked for a long time. They spoke Russian. Not knowing the language, Bourke-White smiled in agreement at each man as he spoke. Only later did she learn that she had agreed to marry each one of them. Her assistant explained the mistake and said to the men: “Miss Bourke-White loves nothing but her camera.”
VOICE ONE:
By the end of the trip, Margaret Bourke-White had traveled eight thousand kilometers throughout the Soviet Union. She took hundreds of pictures, and published some of them in her first book, “Eyes on Russia.” She returned the next year to prepare for a series of stories for the New York Times newspaper. And she went back a third time to make an educational movie for the Kodak film company.
Bourke-White visited Soviet cities, farms and factories. She took pictures of workers using machines. She took pictures of peasant women, village children, and even the mother of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. She took pictures of the country’s largest bridge, and the world’s largest dam. She used her skill in mixing darkness and light to create works of art. She returned home with more than three thousand photographs – the first western documentary on the Soviet Union.
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VOICE TWO:
Margaret Bourke-White had seen a great deal for someone not yet thirty years old. But in nineteen thirty-four, she saw something that would change her idea of the world. Fortune magazine sent her on a trip through the central part of the United States. She was told to photograph farmers – from America’s northern border with Canada to its southern border with Mexico.
Some of the farmers were victims of a terrible shortage of rain, and of their own poor farming methods. The good soil had turned to dust. And the wind blew the dust over everything. It got into machines and stopped them. It chased the farmers from their land, although they had nowhere else to go.
VOICE ONE:
Bourke-White had never given much thought to human suffering. After her trip, she had a difficult time forgetting. She decided to use her skills to show all parts of life. She would continue taking industrial pictures of happy, healthy people enjoying their shiny new cars. But she would tell a different story in her photographic essays.
Under one picture she wrote: “While machines are making great progress in automobile factories, the workers might be under-paid. Pictures can be beautiful. But they must tell facts, too.” We will continue the story of photographer Margaret Bourke-White next week.
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VOICE TWO:
This program was written by Shelley Gollust. It was produced by Lawan Davis. Our studio engineer was Tom Verba. I’m Steve Ember.
VOICE ONE:
And I’m Barbara Klein. Join us again next week for People in America in VOA Special English.
