This country is at war with Germany.

We shall go on to the end.

I remember the sheets of flame which came up and almost blinded us from our guns.

Douglas MacArthur is one of the most prominent and controversial generals of the Second World War.

As a field marshal of the Philippines, he was forced to withdraw to Australia in 1942,

vowing, with his famous words, I shall return.

That promise came to define much of the rest of his war,

but how far did it shape his conduct as a commander? How effective was he as a strategist and a leader?

To explore these questions, I'm joined by Peter Mansour, author of Redemption, MacArthur and the Campaign for the Philippines.

Thanks for joining me, Peter.

And we probably do need to set the scene for MacArthur.

So he's from a military family.

He served in the first world.

What was his early life like?

MacArthur grew up on a succession of army posts.

You know, in his memoir, he talks about these small forts out west where he grew up around soldiers and really embedded in himself the ethic of his father, who was a relatively low-ranking officer for much of his career until the Philippines War bolted him to notoriety. So MacArthur was destined for an army career

from an early age. He went to a Texas military academy and eventually ended up at West Point,

where he was shepherded through the four years by his mother who lived there with him, not with him,

but she was in the hotel on the post. And at that time, the Thayer hotel was within sight of the barracks. So they could,

I guess, flip their lights switches at each other or whatever. But she was very much the major

influence in his upbringing. It's funny, because you'd thought it was his father. You'd

thought his father would be the one that would be dragging into the military.

...