Most of you know about GEN Jonathan Wainwright, who won the Medal of Honor in the Phillipines during WWII.  His citation reads,



However, few people would remember his son, Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright V, who as Master of the SS Bushrod Washington, received the equivelent of the Medal of Honor, the Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal for his actions as cited,







Thus, they are possibly the only father/son combination to receive the the highest award, in their respective services, during the same conflict.

I'm not a huge fan of generals getting MoH for "frequenting the firing line."

That's a fair enough assessment of Wainwright, though his troops did think the world of him, broadly speaking.  Wainwright was the senior ranking officer in the PoW camps, and that probably was a rather unpleasant experience.  At the time, there was the impression that since MacArthur had essentially given himself a MoH, that he was giving Wainwright one, too.

I'm not a huge MacArthur fan, if you couldn't tell.

Skinny Wainwright deserved all that and more.

I don't want anyone to think that I feel that GEN Wainwright's service was anything but laudible...he was put in a tremendously difficult position.  However, so was Stilwell, who was essentially sacrificed by the KMT apologists in Washington, to the evential detriment of both American and KMT interests.

Read "The OSS in China", and "Way of a Fighter" before lauding Stilwell a hero....
he was a Communist supporter and was instrumental in aiding Mao.

Stilwell was branded a "Communist Supporter" by the KMT throughout the entire War.  I read "The OSS in China" (though, in fairness, its been a long time, assuming you're talking about the one written by the Chinese guy, forgot the name) and thought the reporting was a little unfair to Stilwell.  Stilwell viewed his mission as primarily defeating the Japanese, rather than aiding the KMT.  The perception (not always correct, but still widely held) was that the Communists were actively resisting, and the KMT simply wasn't, due to incompentence and corruption.  The fact that there were very few competent and realitively uncorrupt KMT officials led Stilwell, and others, to believe that even if the KMT was right, they couldn't win.  That assessment (which was proven correct) combined with a rather naive idea (IMO) that the nature of the post-War Chinese government was a matter best to left up to the Chinese, by and large, contributed what would historically occur.

Like it or not, it was the KMT, not the U.S., who lost China.  My personal view is that a combination of KMT corruption and fecklessness, a China lobby in the US totally focused on perpuetuation of KMT governance rather than a friendly China, an almost a complete lack of unity of effort (just about every U.S. .gov organization had some kind of presense in China, often pursuing contradictory efforts),  and highly efficient Communist penetration of our operational and decision making centers (thus a total counter-intelligence failure, possibly without equal in history) all conspired to send the KMT to Taiwan in 1949.

MacArthur is lucky that Wainwright didn't kill him in Japan.