... The picture in question, made by LIFE’s Carl Mydans on Jan. 9, 1945, shows MacArthur striding ashore onto the beach at Lingayen, on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. That Mydans’ photograph does not capture the return to the Philippines—the return that MacArthur promised in his single most famous utterance—hardly detracts from its significance. In fact, even more so than the pictures of MacArthur at Leyte in October 1944, when the general first returned to the Philippines after escaping from Corregidor two years before, Mydans’ photograph of the general and his comrades in the surf at Luzon seems to capture and perfectly distill something elemental about MacArthur’s magnetism and his larger-than-life persona...