March 21, 1942: General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Army, having led an escape from the Philippines with several thousand men, arrives in Melbourne, Australia. Delivering a message to his adopted homeland by radio, he said, "I cam through, and I shall return."
MacArthur was a well-known and experienced officer, with a distinguished record in World War I, the 2nd half of the only father-and-son pair to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. However, he had also been in charge of the U.S. Army's flushing the Bonus Army off Capitol Hill in 1932.
He had retired in 1937, and had become a defense advisor to the Philippine government. He was recalled to active duty with the U.S. Army in July 1941, a few months before the outbreak of the Pacific phase of World War II, to become commander of U.S. Army Forces in the Far East, uniting the Philippine and United States Armies under one command.
But in March 1942, the Japanese invasion of the Philippines forced MacArthur to withdraw his forces on Luzon to Bataan, while his headquarters and his family moved to Corregidor. The doomed defense of Bataan captured the imagination of the American public. At a time when the news from all fronts was uniformly bad, MacArthur became a symbol of Allied resistance to the Japanese.
Fearing that Corregidor would soon fall, and MacArthur would be taken prisoner, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered MacArthur to go to Australia. A submarine was made available, but MacArthur elected to break through the Japanese blockade in PT (Patrol Torpedo) boats. The staff MacArthur brought with him became known as the "Bataan Gang," and would become the nucleus of his General Headquarters (GHQ)
Having thought his whereabouts would have been secret, MacArthur was alarmed to find crowds, a military guard of honor and reporters waiting for his 9:00 AM arrival. The reporters' expectations of a briefing were unmet: he simply said that his policy during operations was to limit himself completely to the briefest publicity and to confine such statements to general releases from his headquarters.
He followed briefly with the reason he was in Australia, and concluded with a catchphrase that both alluded to his perilous journey and embodied his single-minded focus on liberating the Philippines that became widely publicized during the next three years: "I came through, and I shall return."
Carlos Romulo, a Philippine journalist, had written the speech for MacArthur, but he'd written, "We shall return. MacArthur made it "I shall return." But in the wake of Japan's subsequent war crime, which became known as the Bataan Death March, Romulo decided that MacArthur was right, saying of the people of the Philippines: "America has let us down, and won't be trusted. But the people still have confidence in MacArthur. If he says he is coming back, he will be believed."
But, at first, it sounded like MacArthur was putting himself ahead of troops -- when he would not be able to return until his troops had retaken the Philippines, or at least one of the major islands that makes up that island nation. It even became a joke: One soldier would say to another, "I'm going to the latrine. I shall return."
On October 20, 1944, American troops landed on the Philippine island of Leyte. In a prepared speech, MacArthur said, "People of the Philippines: I have returned." That statement was premature -- the capital of Manila was not secured until March 3, 1945 -- but "I shall return" was no longer a joke. In the years to come, when someone would say, "I shall return," he was trying to say that he meant it, just like MacArthur did.
In the 1984 film The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger began using the expression, "I'll be back." By that point, World War II had been over for nearly 40 years, and MacArthur had been dead for 20. After that, "I shall return" became used considerably less often.
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March 21, 1942 was a Saturday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. Only 1 game was played in the NHL: The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the New York Rangers, 3-1 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.
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