 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(October 2009) |
| Field Marshal of the Philippines | |
|---|---|
| Country |  Philippines |
| Service branch |  Philippine Army |
| Formation | 1936 |
| Abolished | 1946 |
| Next higher rank | None |
| Next lower rank | General |
Field Marshal of the Philippines was a rank created in 1936 to be held by Douglas MacArthur.
US Army General Douglas MacArthur was the first and only field marshal in the history of the Philippine Army, a position he held while also acting as the Military Advisor to the Commonwealth Government of the Philippines with a rank of major general. President Quezon conferred the rank of field marshal on 24 August 1936 and MacArthur's duty included the supervision of the creation of the Philippine nation-state.
MacArthur was accorded the rank as Military Advisor to the Commonwealth Government of the Philippines, which retained his services to form an army in response to the growing danger from Japan and the increasing likelihood of war in the Pacific.
MacArthur retired from the United States Army as a major-general, having previously served as a full general while Chief of Staff of the United States Army. President Manuel L. Quezon then hired him as a military advisor and commissioned him a Field Marshal in the Philippine Army, a rank which had not previously existed. (MacArthur's wife found the situation amusing and often remarked that MacArthur had gone from holding the highest rank in the United States Army to holding the highest rank in a non-existent army.)[ citation needed ]
President Quezon officially conferred the title of Field Marshal on MacArthur in a ceremony at Malacañan Palace on August 24, 1936. He was presented at that time with a gold baton and a unique uniform. [1] Although unofficially considered as the five-star rank in the Armed Forces of the Philippines, MacArthur wore no special insignia as Field Marshal of the Philippines, except for a modification to his army officer's cap. To the standard gold-trimmed visor of a United States general's cap, MacArthur added gilt trim to the front body of the cap, above the visor. MacArthur referred to this modified headdress as his "Philippine Field Marshal's cap" and wore it for the duration of World War II and into the Korean War. However, the modified army headdress was against regulations, and MacArthur never officially obtained permission to wear this as a part of his uniform.
On December 31, 1937, MacArthur first retired from the U.S. Army and the Philippine Army. He ceased to represent the United States as military adviser to the government but remained in the Philippines as Quezon's adviser in a civilian capacity. [2]
In July 1941, MacArthur was recalled to active duty as Supreme Allied Commander South West Pacific Area. [3] For the duration of the war he continued to wear the "Field Marshal's cap".
Emilio Aguinaldo, the first President of the Philippines, held an equivalent rank of five-star general under the title "Generalissimo" and "Minister Marshal" as the first Commander-in-Chief of the AFP.
After 1946, the rank of Field Marshal disappeared from the Philippine military and today is obsolete (the highest rank now obtainable is that of four-star general). In theory, the rank could again be conferred, but this would only be in the event of the Philippines' entering into a major war.
The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) are the military forces of the Philippines. It consists of three main service branches; the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy. The President of the Philippines is the Commander-in-Chief of the AFP and forms military policy with the Department of National Defense, an executive department acting as the principal organ by which military policy is carried out, while the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines serves as the overall commander and the highest-ranking officer in the AFP. The Philippine Coast Guard also serves as an attached service of the AFP in wartime. Military service is entirely voluntary.
Douglas MacArthur was an American military leader who served as General of the Army for the United States, as well as a field marshal to the Philippine Army. He was Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the 1930s, and he played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II. MacArthur received the Medal of Honor for his service in the Philippines campaign. This made him along with his father Arthur MacArthur Jr. the first father and son to be awarded the medal. He was one of only five to rise to the rank of General of the Army in the U.S. Army, and the only one conferred the rank of field marshal in the Philippine Army.
The Commonwealth of the Philippines was the administrative body that governed the Philippines from 1935 to 1946, aside from a period of exile in the Second World War from 1942 to 1945 when Japan occupied the country. It was established following the Tydings–McDuffie Act to replace the Insular Government, a United States territorial government. The Commonwealth was designed as a transitional administration in preparation for the country's full achievement of independence. Its foreign affairs remained managed by the United States.
Manuel Luis Quezon y Molina,, also known by his initials MLQ, was a Filipino lawyer, statesman, soldier and politician who served as president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines from 1935 until his death in 1944. He was the first Filipino to head a government of the entire Philippines, and is considered to have been the second president of the Philippines, after Emilio Aguinaldo (1899–1901), whom Quezon defeated in the 1935 presidential election.
The Office of the Military Advisor to the Commonwealth Government (OMACG) was created in 1935 upon the initiative of President Manuel L. Quezon by the Philippine and American governments for the purposes of developing a system of national defense for the Commonwealth of the Philippines by 1946. OMACG's recommendations were adopted by the Philippine National Assembly in Commonwealth Act Number 1, the National Defense Act of 1935.
United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) was a military formation of the United States Army active from 1941 to 1946. The new command's headquarters was created on 26 July 1941, at No. 1, Calle Victoria, Manila, Luzon, the Philippines, with General Douglas MacArthur as commander. The Chief of Staff was Brigadier General Richard K. Sutherland and the Deputy Chief of Staff was Lieutenant Colonel Richard J. Marshall. The core of this command was drawn from the Office of the Military Advisor to the Commonwealth Government.
Field marshal is the most senior military rank, ordinarily senior to the general officer ranks. Usually, it is the highest rank in an army and as such few persons are appointed to it. It is considered as a five-star rank (OF-10) in modern-day armed forces in many countries. Promotion to the rank of field marshal in many countries historically required extraordinary military achievement by a general. However, the rank has also been used as a divisional command rank and also as a brigade command rank. Examples of the different uses of the rank include Austria-Hungary, Pakistan, Prussia/Germany, India and Sri Lanka for an extraordinary achievement; Spain and Mexico for a divisional command ; and France, Portugal and Brazil for a brigade command.
Arthur MacArthur Jr. was a lieutenant general of the United States Army. He became the military Governor-General of the American-occupied Philippines in 1900; his term ended a year later due to clashes with the civilian governor, future-U.S. President William Howard Taft.
Carlos Peña Romulo Sr. was a Filipino diplomat, statesman, soldier, journalist and author. He was a reporter at the age of 16, a newspaper editor by 20, and a publisher at 32. He was a co-founder of the Boy Scouts of the Philippines, a general in the US Army and the Philippine Army, university president, and president of the United Nations General Assembly.
Manuel Acuña Roxas was a Filipino lawyer and politician who served as the fifth president of the Philippines, who served from 1946 until his death due to heart attacks in 1948. He briefly served as the third and last president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines from May 28, 1946, to July 4, 1946, and became the first president of the independent Third Philippine Republic after the United States ceded its sovereignty over the Philippines.
The Philippine Legion of Honor was established by President Manuel Roxas, through Philippine Army Circular No. 60 dated July 3, 1947. The Philippine Legion of Honor was patterned after the Legion of Merit of the United States of America, and was meant to honor both civilians and members of the military, Filipino or foreign. Originally, like the U.S. Legion of Merit, the Philippine Legion of Honor had four classes, known as degrees, with Legionnaire being the basic rank, and Chief Commander being the highest. With the reform of the Philippine system of orders and decorations in 2003, the Philippine Legion of Honor's classes were renamed "ranks" instead of "degrees", and the ranks expanded.
Francis Burton Harrison was an American statesman who served in the United States House of Representatives and was appointed governor-general of the Philippines by President of the United States Woodrow Wilson. Harrison was a prominent adviser to the president of the Philippine Commonwealth, as well as the next four presidents of the Republic of the Philippines. He is the only former governor-general of the Philippines to be awarded Philippine citizenship.
The Commonwealth of the Philippines was attacked by the Empire of Japan on 8 December 1941, nine hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Although it was governed by a semi-independent commonwealth government, the United States of America controlled the Philippines at the time and possessed important military bases there. The combined Filipino-American army was defeated in the Battle of Bataan and the Battle of Corregidor in April 1942, but guerrilla resistance against the Japanese continued throughout the war. Uncaptured Filipino army units, a communist insurgency, and supporting American agents all played a role in the resistance. Due to the huge number of islands, the Japanese never occupied many of the smaller and more minor islands. Japanese control over the countryside and smaller towns were often tenuous at best.
A five-star rank is the highest military rank in many countries. The rank is that of the most senior operational military commanders, and within NATO's standard rank scale it is designated by the code OF-10. Not all armed forces have such a rank, and in those that do the actual insignia of the five-star ranks may not contain five stars. For example: the insignia for the French OF-10 rank maréchal de France contains seven stars; the insignia for the Portuguese marechal contains four gold stars. The stars used on the rank insignias of various Commonwealth of Nations are sometimes referred to colloquially as pips, but are stars of the orders of the Garter, Thistle or Bath or Eversleigh stars depending on the wearer's original regiment or corps, and are used in combination with other heraldic items, such as batons, crowns, swords or maple leaves.
This is the service summary of Douglas MacArthur, a General in the United States Army, who began his career in 1899 and served in three major military conflicts, going on to hold the highest military offices of both the United States and the Philippines.
The Philippine Army was established on December 21, 1935, as the Army of the Philippines, with a general headquarters in Manila, and units and formations based throughout the provinces of the Philippines.
Emigdio C. Cruz was a Philippine Army officer and a recipient the Philippines' highest military award for courage, the Medal of Valor. Cruz was the personal physician of Manuel Quezon. After accompanying the Philippine President to the United States at the onset of the Pacific War, Cruz was sent back to the Philippines by Douglas MacArthur in order to establish contact with Filipino guerrillas fighting the Imperial Japanese forces occupying the country.
Basilio José Segundo "Basil" Pica Valdés was a Filipino doctor, general and minister. Valdes was chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Commonwealth of the Philippines from 1939, and was in 1941 appointed Secretary of National Defense by President Manuel L. Quezon. After the Japanese invasion of the Philippines at the beginning of the Second World War, he was one of the members of Quezon's war cabinet in exile.
The Government of the Commonwealth of the Philippines in exile was a continuation of the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippines after they had been evacuated from the country during World War II. The Commonwealth of the Philippines was self-governing, although under the ultimate control of the United States.
Antonio C. Torres, KGCR, founder and first Supreme Commander of the Order of the Knights of Rizal and first Filipino Chief of Police of the Manila Police Department in 1936.