As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week, Jonathan writes about General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright and his wife. And if you are looking for a fantastic history book this remembrance season, you can do no better than Jonathan’s The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines, which is now available in paperback. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors
Not many visitors to Arlington National Cemetery make it out back behind the mansion house, where the graves run up against the old cavalry post formerly known as Fort Myer. In the grass past a Japanese cedar is a tombstone bearing four stars and two names carved into military lore: Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright and Adele Holley Wainwright. The engraved text identifies him as “General, United States Army,” and her merely as “his beloved wife.”
As is always the case at Arlington, there is more to be said. The ease with which the Wainwrights lie together belies a story of separation and suffering symbolic of the sacrifices that generations of service members and their families have made for our freedom. With Memorial Day this week, we owe it to remember the general who became the highest-ranking American prisoner of World War II and his long-suffering wife, who became a prisoner of an enemy of a different kind.
The Free Press Community Sale Is Here!
Limited-time offer: New subscribers to The Free Press get 20 percent off their first year.
Think for yourself, not by yourself.
“Home is where the husband is.” That was the saying in the military family where Wainwright had grown up, and Adele Holley embraced it in 1911 upon marrying the skinny West Point graduate who had followed his father into the cavalry and loved riding horses, singing, and reading military history. There was no other way to be married to a cavalryman but to be ready to pick up at a moment’s notice and set off wherever duty led. In 1940, that meant going to the Philippines, then a U.S. colony, for what the Wainwrights assumed would be the final assignment in a career that had taken him to Europe during World War I and more recently made him a general officer. Adele would have stuck it out in the Philippines till the bitter end had the military not ordered army wives and children to leave in May 1941, amid fears that the islands would be difficult to defend in the event of war with Japan.
