Sutherland was born in Hancock, Maryland, United States, on 27 November 1893, the only son among the six children of Howard Sutherland, who later became a US Senator from West Virginia, and Etfie Harris Sutherland. He was the son of Howard Sutherland, later United States senator from West Virginia, and Effie Harris.
After graduating from high school in Elkins, West Virginia, in 1912, he entered Yale University, earning a B. A. in 1916. During the ensuing thirteen months, he first studied at the Army Service Schools in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
He graduated from the advanced course of the Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia. (1923); the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth (1928); the Ecole Superieure de Guerre in Paris (1930); and the Army War College in Washington (1933).
Richard was in the Eleventh Infantry Regiment at posts in Arizona and Georgia; he gained his first company command and promotions to first lieutenant and captain. Later, he served on the Mexican border in a federalized National Guard unit, became a second lieutenant of infantry in the regular army. Sutherland joined the Second Infantry Division in France in January 1918 and subsequently saw action in several sectors, including Chateau-Thierry. After the Armistice he was in the Rhine occupation. His tours of duty from 1919 to 1937 included various school, troop, and staff assignments.
He served with the Sixty-third and Twenty-ninth Infantry regiments in New York and Georgia; on the Infantry School faculty; and on the War Department General Staff during General Douglas MacArthur's final three years as army chief of staff. Sutherland took command of a battalion of the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment at Tientsin, China, four days prior to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in July 1937.
Although not attacked by the Japanese army that soon captured Beijing and Tientsin, the Fifteenth Infantry faced months of high tension. In March 1938, Sutherland was promoted to major and assigned to the Manila staff of MacArthur, military adviser to the Philippine Commonwealth since late 1935. At first, his job was advising the fledgling Philippine army on procurement and budgetary matters. Inadequate funding by the American and Philippine governments had sorely handicapped MacArthur's development of Filipino defense forces. Sutherland demonstrated unusual efficiency and drive, prompting MacArthur to remark that autumn, "Concise, energetic, and able, he has been invaluable. "
Promoted to lieutenant colonel in mid-1938, he became MacArthur's chief of staff in December 1939, when Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower was transferred to the United States. With Japanese relations worsening, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed MacArthur as commander of United States Army Forces, Far East (USAFFE), in July 1941.
MacArthur, in turn, selected Sutherland as USAFFE chief of staff with the rank of brigadier general (major general in December). USAFFE headquarters knew of the Pearl Harbor attack nine hours before Japanese aircraft hit Iba and Clark fields on Luzon, destroying most American bombers and fighters there. Major General Lewis H. Brereton, MacArthur's air commander, later blamed Sutherland for the situation that produced the destruction of so many planes on the ground. But the USAFFE chief of staff countered that Brereton was at fault. The controversy remains unsettled, for no official investigation of the fiasco was made.
From late December 1941 onward, MacArthur's headquarters was located on Corregidor Island at the mouth of Manila Bay. As the Japanese invaders pushed the American and Filipino troops down Bataan Peninsula, Corregidor came under mounting air and artillery bombardment. Sutherland performed well under the intense pressure, capably overseeing staff activities, advising MacArthur, and acting as liaison between him and senior field officers. He was awarded a number of decorations for his conduct under combat conditions during the Bataan-Corregidor operations as well as in other situations under fire later in the war against Japan. When MacArthur finally obeyed Roosevelt's order to leave Corregidor, Sutherland was one of the fifteen army officers that he took with him to Australia in March 1942.
MacArthur became commander of a new Allied theater that April, the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA), and he promptly announced Sutherland as the SWPA chief of staff. In the next few months at Melbourne and later Brisbane, Sutherland developed a new headquarters organization to prepare for beginning offensive operations in New Guinea. As he had sent him to the front on Bataan earlier, MacArthur sometimes dispatched Sutherland to consult combat commanders during the bloody Papuan campaign of July 1942-January 1943.
For Sutherland, the half year following the conquest of Papua was a busy time of staff expansion and coordinating the rapid buildup of SWPA forces. That spring he represented the USAFFE commander at a Pacific strategy conference in Washington with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and with representatives from the other Pacific theater headquarters (Pearl Harbor and Noumea). Sutherland forcefully but futilely presented MacArthur's case for higher priority on SWPA operations and against opening a Central Pacific offensive. By February 1944, when Sutherland became a lieutenant general, SWPA forces had taken Northeast New Guinea, the Admiralties, and part of New Britain. In the next seven months they would conquer Netherlands New Guinea and Morotai, advancing above the equator. Sutherland moved to Hollandia on the Dutch New Guinea coast to set up advance headquarters in April.
That spring, too, he returned to Washington for another conference on future Pacific strategy; he defended MacArthur's plans strongly, if not always tactfully. When MacArthur's forces secured the northeast coast of Leyte in the Philippines in October 1944, he told Sutherland to establish advance SWPA headquarters there, at Tacloban. He and Sutherland were nearly hit on several occasions during heavy Japanese air raids on Tacloban. Long regarded as the SWPA commander's principal confidant, Sutherland had an angry clash with him at Tacloban, and the two men were never close again. In March 1945, Sutherland moved on to battle-devastated Manila, where SWPA headquarters was to be set up.
He continued to display skill in planning and organizing but had lost much of his earlier dynamism. Nonetheless, MacArthur chose him as chief of staff for both of his new commands in the spring and summer of 1945 - United States Army Forces, Pacific (USAFPAC), and Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, Japan (SCAP).
Sutherland had conspicuous roles at the Japanese surrender ceremony aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay and later at Tokyo headquarters in administering nonmilitary and military activities of the occupation.
Faced with declining health, however, he obtained a transfer to the United States in December 1945 and retired in 1946 after a short stint at the headquarters of Army Ground Forces in Washington.
He died in Washington.
On October 1, 1919 he married Josephine Whiteside; they had one child. Following his first wife's death, he married Mrs. Virginia (Shaw) Root in 1962.
