Douglas MacArthur’s 1961 Passport
The Five-Star Passport: Douglas MacArthur’s 1961 Travel Document
I’d long wanted to get my hands on a scan of Douglas MacArthur’s passport, so I reached out directly to the MacArthur Memorial Archives in Norfolk, Virginia, and asked. They agreed, and what arrived was a 1961 document scan bearing a photograph showing him in uniform, a five-star General of the Army who by then had already shaped the destiny of two nations and presided over the surrender that ended the deadliest war in human history.
In return, I sent them a copy of my book, LET PASS OR DIE, which felt like a fitting exchange between two institutions devoted to keeping this kind of history alive.
Why a Five-Star General Carried an Ordinary Passport
It’s a fair question: why would Douglas MacArthur, holder of one of the highest ranks ever conferred on an American soldier, need a civilian travel document at all? By 1961, MacArthur had been a private citizen for a full decade. President Truman relieved him of command on April 11, 1951, after months of public disagreement over strategy in Korea, and MacArthur’s famous “old soldiers never die” address to Congress marked the practical end of his military career. He retired to New York and lived quietly until his death in 1964, and like any American traveling abroad in his retirement years, he needed a standard passport to do it.
The man pictured on that 1961 document, however, was anything but ordinary. MacArthur was one of only five men in American history to hold the five-star rank of General of the Army, and he remains the only person ever to hold the rank of Field Marshal in the Philippine Army, a title President Manuel Quezon created specifically for him in a ceremony at Malacañan Palace on August 24, 1936. MacArthur, only half joking, kept wearing a modified version of his Philippine general’s cap for the rest of his career, gold trim and all, straight through World War II and into Korea. It’s the cap most people picture when they think of him.
A Soldier’s Family, A Soldier’s Whole Life
MacArthur was, in a very literal sense, raised by the Army. His father, Arthur MacArthur Jr., had earned the Medal of Honor as a teenager for leading the charge up Missionary Ridge during the Civil War, and the family’s postings carried young Douglas from a frontier outpost at Fort Selden, New Mexico, to Fort Leavenworth, to Washington, and eventually to San Antonio, where he finally distinguished himself academically at the West Texas Military Academy. He entered West Point in 1899 and graduated first in his class in 1903, a record that, combined with his father’s recent service as military governor of the Philippines, set the trajectory for the rest of his life: the Philippines, again and again, would be where MacArthur’s story kept returning.
The Bond With the Philippines That Defined a Career
His first posting out of West Point sent him to the Philippines with an Army engineering corps, and the relationship that began there never really ended. He went on to serve as Army Chief of Staff under President Hoover from 1930 to 1935, a difficult tenure marked by Depression-era budget cuts and the controversial removal of the Bonus Army veterans from Washington in 1932. When that chapter closed, his old friend Manuel Quezon, now president of the newly formed Philippine Commonwealth, brought him back to Manila in 1935 to build a national defense force ahead of the islands’ scheduled 1946 independence. It was on that voyage to Manila that MacArthur met Jean Marie Faircloth, the woman who would become his second wife and a steady source of support for the rest of his life; their son, Arthur MacArthur IV, was born in Manila in 1938.
Corregidor, “I Shall Return,” and the Long Road Back
The Philippines that MacArthur had spent six years preparing collapsed within weeks of Japan’s December 1941 attack. By early 1942, his forces had withdrawn to the Bataan Peninsula, and MacArthur was directing what remained of the defense from Corregidor, the island fortress at the mouth of Manila Bay. President Roosevelt, unwilling to risk losing his most prominent general to capture, ordered MacArthur to Australia in March 1942. He left by PT boat, reportedly telling reporters in South Australia, “I came out of Bataan and I shall return,” a vow that became the rallying cry of the entire Pacific campaign.
He kept it. MacArthur waded ashore at Leyte in October 1944, and within months the Philippines were liberated. On September 2, 1945, he stood aboard the USS Missouri and accepted Japan’s formal surrender, closing out the war he had fought since its first chaotic week.
From Occupier to Outcast: Japan, Korea, and a Presidential Dismissal
MacArthur’s postwar role as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in occupied Japan, a position he held for nearly six years, is arguably as consequential as anything he did in combat: his administration helped rebuild a shattered economy and steer Japan toward a new constitutional government. When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, MacArthur orchestrated the amphibious landing at Inchon, one of the more audacious gambits in modern military history, and reversed what had looked like a lost war almost overnight. But his subsequent push toward the Chinese border drew Mao’s forces into the conflict, and his open disagreements with the Truman administration over how to fight the war that followed led directly to his dismissal in April 1951.
If naval history from this same era interests you, I’ve also written about a Special Passport belonging to a Navy Commander who fought at both Pearl Harbor and Midway, another document that puts a single name to two of the defining battles of the Pacific War.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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