As a schoolboy, I learned the difference in usage between “will” and “shall” with a quote from Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who is famous for saying, “I shall return.”
The full quote from the general was, “I came through and I shall return.” He was actually in Australia, not the Philippines, when he said this. It was March 20, 1942, at a tiny railway station in Terowie, South Australia.
On the night of March 11-12 he had fled the heavily fortified island of Corregidor at the entrance to Manila Bay. With him were his wife, Jean, and their 4-year-old son, Arthur. They embarked on a perilous, 35-hour overnight journey by PT boat to northern Mindanao, where they boarded a “Flying Fortress” — an American B-17 bomber — for Australia.
He was now speaking to the press while changing trains en route to Adelaide and Melbourne.
What he meant by his remark at the railway station was that he had survived the Japanese attack on Corregidor and that he would return eventually to the Philippines.
Today this comes to mind because it was almost exactly 82 years ago that Gen. MacArthur dramatically waded ashore on Leyte, having met his promise by returning to the Philippines after an absence of two years, seven months and nine days.
The event on the beach on Oct. 20, 1944, is commemorated by the MacArthur Landing Memorial Park in the municipality of Palo on Leyte Island.
In Australia, Gen. MacArthur could have said, “I will return,” but if he had, then history might have been written differently.
However, he used “shall” rather than “will” to make it absolutely clear that his return to the Philippines was not a mere probability, but an inevitability — that is to say, it was destined to happen. His return to the Philippines was set in concrete, so to speak.
I feel a personal connection to the events of those times because my father landed in Leyte in a supporting role shortly after Gen. MacArthur. My dad was not a combat infantryman, however. He was a graduate of the United States Military Academy, a young Army captain in the signal corps with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. So, his job on Leyte, as he described it to me later, was to build radio stations and antenna towers for other military units to communicate with one another, and, consequently, he was almost always “behind friendly lines”.
Meanwhile, in 1944 I was still in diapers and living with my mother in Hackensack, New Jersey, a bedroom community of New York City. Years later, when I asked my dad what he actually did on Leyte, he said not much. The Japanese had largely departed from the island by the time he arrived, he said, so he and his soldiers spent their days drinking beer on the beach and repairing an abandoned landing craft that they used for water skiing.
Viewed from the panoply of feature films set in the World War II Pacific theater of operations, life on Leyte late in 1944 was, I gathered, more reminiscent of “Operation Petticoat” than of “The Thin Red Line”.
Anyway, Gen. MacArthur’s use of “shall” befit his histrionic character. This is further evidenced by the famous photo of him striding through the surf on Leyte. The photo was not just a lucky shot, but was carefully choreographed, according to witnesses. The beach scene is faithfully depicted in the 1977 film MacArthur starring Gregory Peck.
Some critics pointed to MacArthur’s perennial concern for his public image and argued that the dramatic wading ashore was a mere photo opp — newspeak for “photographic opportunity” — rather than a spontaneous combat landing.
In the broader context of wartime filmic propaganda, which was laid on thick in the United States, such visual symbolism was routinely cultivated. This reinforced suspicions that the Leyte mis-en-scéne had been arranged for maximum political and psychological effect.
A veteran whose unit operated the landing craft in the film said Gen. MacArthur made the short trip several times for the newsreel and photographic coverage.
Three Different Landings
Later research reveals that there was, in fact, not single staged photo opp on one day that produced the famous picture.
Witnesses said MacArthur actually landed on three different beaches over a period of four days, visiting frontline commanders and consolidating the reestablishment of the Philippine Army.
This and other events gave rise to Gen. MacArthur’s reputation as a narcissist, a man constantly worried about his image in the public eye.
Bryce McIntyre, PhD, resides in San Andres. He holds a doctoral degree from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA.
Perplexity AI aided in the research for this article.