Supreme Commander (2 page)

PART ONE

TAKING CONTROL

1

A President Rolls the Dice

H
E HAD NEVER
met the man. Never even talked to him . . . not once.

In 1945, on August 12, the president of the United States was about to make a decision. A decision based on incomplete information, yet one that had to be made one way or another whether he liked it or not. To procrastinate would only be another form of decision. Japan was now defeated: the Tokyo air raids, the two atom bombs, and the naval blockade had assured closure. Peace negotiations were well under way; any moment an agreement would be reached. There was one stumbling block: the Japanese demand that there be no occupation of their country, which of course was totally unacceptable to the United States. There would be an occupation, and to make sure the Japanese got the message, Truman would appoint as head of it America's most successful general, the man the Japanese feared most: Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the man who had conquered the Philippines and electrified the nation—and terrified the Japanese—with his poignant slogan, “I shall return!”

There was a small problem: not only had the president not met him, he didn't like him.

Essentially a president makes two kinds of decisions. Easy decisions where he knows exactly what he wants to do and he is convinced he is right, and hard decisions where he has little information to go on or where the alternatives are unpalatable and he's basically groping in the dark. He will never admit this, of course; he will put on a show that he knows what he's doing, showing the world how decisive—and what a good actor—he is. Truth be told, at times he is really rolling the dice.

The personnel file on MacArthur contained many papers, including a curriculum vitae used for press releases.

1880  Born January 26, son of a general, grandson of a U.S. Supreme Court justice

1897  Class valedictorian, West Texas Military Academy

1903  Graduated first in class from West Point, with a 98.14 average—one of the three highest grades ever recorded in the history of the academy (one of the two other high achievers being Robert E. Lee)

1904–13 Posted to the Philippine Islands, the Panama Canal Zone, and the United States as engineering officer; promoted to first lieutenant, 1904; as aide-de-camp to his father, Gen. Arthur MacArthur, inspected Japanese military bases, 1905, and toured China, Siam, Java, the Malay States, Burma, India, and Ceylon in 1906; spent year as White House military aide to President Theodore Roosevelt; promoted to captain

1914  Conducted hazardous reconnaissance mission during U.S. occupation of Veracruz, Mexico; recommended for the Medal of Honor (did not receive it)

1914–19 Served on the general staff of the War Department; head of the Bureau of Information conducting press relations for the secretary of war; promoted to major, 1915; initiated and implemented plan to form a twenty-thousand-man National Guard division comprising units from several states, known as the Forty-Second Infantry, or “Rainbow” Division, American Expeditionary Force; chief of staff of the Rainbow Division, with the rank of colonel; served in France, 1918: led the Rainbow Division into battle, promoted to brigadier general; awarded two Distinguished Service Crosses, seven Silver Stars, and two Purple Hearts; awarded by France two Croix de Guerre and made a Commandeur of the Légion d'Honneur; recommended for the Medal of Honor (again passed over); participated in the occupation of the Rhineland in Germany

1919–22 Superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy (West Point): modernized curriculum, replaced summer camp (mostly a social activity) with basic infantry training; curbed practice of excessive hazing; formulated the honor code to be administered by the cadets; promoted intercollegiate athletics and initiated a new program of intramural sports; maintained four-year program despite cost pressures to reduce it to three

1922  Commander of the Military District of Manila, Philippine Islands

1923  Commander of a brigade in the Philippine Division

1925  Awarded second star, promoted to major general

1925–28 Served in various U.S. postings; served as one of the judges of the court-martial that tried Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell; president of the American Olympic Committee during the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam

1928–30 Commander of the Philippine Department, Manila; developed plans for a large Filipino self-defense force

1930–35 Chief of staff, U.S. Army: led resistance to budget cutbacks during a time of widespread pacifism; on the instructions of President Herbert Hoover, led forcible expulsion of the so-called Bonus Army protesters from Washington, D.C., 1932; appointed by President Roosevelt to head the Civilian Conservation Corps; in 1933, appointed chief of staff; term extended one year (first time this was ever done); awarded citation (Bronze Oak Leaf Cluster) for distinguished service, 1935

1935–41 Returned to the Philippines at the request of Manuel Quezon, first president of the new Commonwealth of the Philippines, as military advisor and field marshal to create a strong Filipino army; retired from the U.S. Army, 1937

1941  Recalled by President Roosevelt to active duty as major general and commander of U.S. Army Forces Far East, responsible for managing U.S. troops and a fleet of B-17 bombers, and training ten new Filipino divisions; promoted to lieutenant general, subsequently promoted to general

1942  After three months of leading fierce ground resistance to superior Japanese forces, ordered by President Roosevelt to escape to Australia to plan counterattack; received the Medal of Honor; appointed Commander of Allied Forces, Southwest Pacific (troops mostly Australian)

1944  Appointed Commander of American Southwest Pacific Area by President Roosevelt; led the assault on Japanese territories in the Pacific; conducted victorious New Guinea campaign: upon reaching the Philippines, waded ashore at Leyte on October 20 and fulfilled promise, “I shall return!” Awarded third Distinguished Service medal; appointed by the Australian government an honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath; promoted to new five-star rank of General of the Army (along with George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower).

No question, this man was in illustrious company, not only with Marshall and Eisenhower but also with other five-stars like General Arnold and Admirals Halsey, Leahy, King, and Nimitz. Plus this man had been the army chief of staff and superintendent of West Point—to which President Truman had once sought admission and been rejected. Most impressive of all, this man was a recipient of the vaunted Medal of Honor (and had been recommended for it three times, not just once—that, too, must set a record).

The Medal of Honor. How proud the president would have been in his place! A World War I veteran himself, an avid reader of military history and admirer of great generals, Harry S Truman often thought he would rather be a Medal of Honor recipient than be a president of the United States.

The position was a political and administrative one: commander of the Allied Powers occupying Japan. Though it reported to the president and the army chief of staff, its powers were far greater than those granted to the president under the Constitution. Its occupant would have total and complete dictatorial control over a nation of nearly eighty million people who had knifed America in the back at Pearl Harbor and waged a bitter war—replete with atrocities—for four and a half years. It would not be an easy assignment, and called for a man of extraordinary leadership skills to bring peace and democracy to a sullen, devastated nation.

Was MacArthur the right man? Brilliant though he had been on the battlefield, he was known as one who marched to the beat of his own drum, hard to control, full of himself. Harry Truman was a person with no pretensions, just a lot of good common sense and a politician's knack for reading people. His own military service in France, seeing the stupidity of generals and the senseless slaughter of grunts like himself, had sharpened his smoldering resentment of pompous generals and the military caste system, a feeling he put to good use as a senator when he headed the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, went after all the wasteful military spending, and saved the United States a staggering three billion dollars. He had made such a good name for himself and the so-called Truman Committee that FDR chose him to be his running mate.

Enough scuttlebutt had filtered up to the White House to make the president leery about this man. In his personal diary of June 17, he had written: “discussed . . . Supreme Commander and what to do with Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur. He's worse than the Cabots and the Lodges—they at least talked with one another before they told God what to do. Mac tells God right off.”

That wasn't all. The president also went on to call him “a play actor and a bunco man” and wonder “how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, and Eisenhower & Bradley and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons, and MacArthurs.”

The problem with MacArthur was that he had a majestically high opinion of himself, almost to the point of having a Mount Rushmore complex. Over the past fifteen years he had referred to himself not in the first person but in the third as if he were an institution: “MacArthur says” . . . “MacArthur requests” . . . “MacArthur thinks.”

Was he too smart for his own good? Too independent? In the 1925 trial of Gen. Billy Mitchell, MacArthur had been the sole judge to vote for acquittal, saying that “a senior officer should not be silenced for being at variance with his superiors in rank and with accepted doctrine.” Fair enough, but on two occasions MacArthur had demonstrated a tendency to let his independence veer into insubordination. The first was the 1932 attack on the Bonus Army marchers in Washington: when ordered by Secretary of War Patrick Hurley to clear out the area in a controlled manner, MacArthur had used excessive force that resulted in national headlines and a public relations disaster for President Hoover. A second dereliction was even more serious. Within hours of the Pearl Harbor attack he had been ordered to execute the emergency war plan, Rainbow Five. What a debacle that was! MacArthur, confident that the Japanese wouldn't dare attack, had done nothing. He was wrong: Seven hours later the Japanese launched a surprise raid on the Philippines, and MacArthur lost almost half his air force—ninety-six planes, mostly sitting on the ground.

Douglas MacArthur hadn't been in the United States since 1937. Had he “gone native”? Truman had no idea. What a strange situation this was! A president of the United States is supposed to meet and personally sign off on every cabinet officer and senior advisor in his administration, and here was Harry Truman, a man who prided himself on his people skills and gut instincts, appointing a stranger to one of the most powerful positions in his administration. Unfortunately there was no time to order MacArthur to Washington for a face-to-face meeting.

Two days earlier the president had received a call from Senator Tom Connally telling him he was “making a mistake in appointing Dugout Doug as Allied Commander in Chief to accept the Jap surrender.” The senator warned him that MacArthur would run against him for president in 1948 if he built him up. The president told the senator that whatever MacArthur might or might not do didn't bother him in the least because he didn't want to run in 1948 anyway.

The president knew Admiral Nimitz wanted this post, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). Truman liked and admired Nimitz, fleet commander of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. But Truman had been president for only a short time—exactly four months now—and was highly reluctant to appear to countermand President Roosevelt's 1944 selection of MacArthur over Nimitz as the lead strategist for the Pacific theater. In his capacity as Commander for the American Southwest Pacific Area, MacArthur had delivered on his promise. For the general who had done the most to bring Japan to its knees, the SCAP position would be a logical reward.

The president knew he really had no choice. “The buck stops here,” famously proclaimed a sign on his desk. He must make a decision. After his secretary came back with the necessary papers, he reached for his pen and signed his name, authorizing the appointment. He was not thrilled: MacArthur was a wild card, a “bunco man.” The president would have to watch him carefully and make sure he didn't cause any trouble.

U.S. presidents make decisions all the time, some they are comfortable with, some they are most definitely not. Truman always said he slept peacefully on the night he made the decision to drop the atom bomb. History does not tell us how he slept on the night he made the decision to appoint MacArthur, but this we do know: It was a superb decision, perhaps the best he ever made.

Even though, in the end, he would have to fire him.

2

Flying Nine Hundred Miles from Okinawa to Atsugi

C
HIEF OF
S
TAFF
:
My God, General, the emperor is worshipped as a real god, yet they tried to assassinate him. What kind of a target will that make you?

M
AC
A
RTHUR:
I'm going.

 

T
HE MAN ON
the plane held the most powerful military position ever created: SCAP, or Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers that had won World War II and now controlled practically the entire globe. His directive from President Truman had been short and sweet: “You will exercise your authority as you deem proper to carry out your mission.”

Oh, how MacArthur loved those words! “As you deem proper.” This would be his show, a job he always wanted. Back in February when he was concluding his victorious swath through the Philippines, he had announced: “Manila is ours . . . on to Tokyo.” It was well understood that when the Americans undertook Operation Downfall, their massive million-man invasion of Japan, he would be the lead general in charge of what was expected to be a ruthless, kamikaze-filled campaign lasting weeks and months down to the last man, even woman. (Reports from his G-12 spy apparatus warned about housewives armed with gasoline-filled bottles and knife-sharpened broomsticks made into bayonets. In such a case the fight for Japan could end up in hand-to-hand combat in the kitchens.)

Fortunately the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had stunned the Japanese, enabling the emperor to overrule the militarists and announce Japan's compliance with the nonnegotiable surrender terms.

Instead of fighting his way into Japan with a massive horde of men that would have made D-Day look like a skirmish, MacArthur was about to arrive as a victor in peace. Or so he hoped. As he looked around his new personal plane, a C-54 marked
Bataan
on the outside to honor the prisoners of war in the Philippines who endured the notorious death march, he noted that his officers and troops were all heavily armed.

A flash of inspiration went through his head: How about—? The more he thought about it, he more he liked the idea. But knowing how his men would react, he kept his mouth shut. He saw his closest advisor three rows away, Maj. Gen. Courtney Whitney. How about bouncing the idea off him? No, not a good move. How about Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, his lovable, crazy “Baron von Willoughby”? Again, probably best not. Leadership is a lonely position: just when you most need reassurance, you must not seek it lest you reveal your fears and destroy the delicate equilibrium that keeps a leader above his followers.

His idea, sure to shock everyone, must remain in his fertile brain, a brain he regarded as second to none and capable of great bursts of creativity like this particular inspiration. Or like the time in Manila when all the telephone lines in Japan were down after the Nagasaki bombing and he single-handedly devised a way to communicate with the Japanese government by using a secret code on the one channel still functioning, the weather channel. No one else in the entire U.S. military had come up with this clever solution.

He won a prize in 1904 from the War Examining Board for his creativity. The written test: suppose he were on an island with a small force of men, and the enemy was about to invade the harbor with a large group of ships, portending certain death. What to do? Other students were stumped. Not MacArthur. His solution? He would paint lots of damaged signs reading “Harbor mined” and throw them into the ocean in front of the harbor. The enemy would stay away, afraid to attack.

On the other hand, too much creativity resulted in crackpot ideas. The military was always coming up with schemes he had to stomp on and make sure never saw the light of day. Like the phosphorescent foxes. That brainchild came from William “Wild Bill” Donovan's OSS, picking up on the Japanese superstition that “a ghostly fox seen at night carries an evil spirit.” The OSS plan went as follows: to make the Japanese think that the gods were about to smite them, the Americans would paint a skulk of foxes with bright phosphorescent paint, toss the animals overboard, and watch them swim to shore and cause panic and fear among the Japanese. MacArthur told the OSS guys the idea was nuts, and told them why. So they made a bet, and a huge shipment of foxes was delivered to Chesapeake Bay for a trial run. The OSS men slapped paint on the squealing animals, then dumped them into the water. Sure enough, MacArthur was right: by the time the foxes reached shore most of the paint had washed off in the salt water. Once on the beach, instead of running into the enemy formations and causing havoc, the foxes lay down on the sand and licked off the remaining paint. MacArthur had a good laugh over that one.

As he looked around the plane, he spotted his aide with the marvelous name of Bonner Fellers, his chief of psychological operations. Fellers had been magnificent: when the OSS had told him about the crackpot phosphorescent fox scheme and rambled on about how their experts understood the Japanese peasant psychology, Fellers had put them in their place so ruthlessly they never uttered a peep again. “Our experts,” Fellers had informed them, “state that your experts are obviously superficial observers.”

His latest idea, thought MacArthur, was no phosphorescent fox. It had merit. But he would keep it close to his vest. He would wait until the last minute before making his announcement, when it would be too late for anyone to object. In the meantime he relished his lunch, munching on an American creation he was unlikely to enjoy again for a long time: a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich.

 

THIS TRIUMPHANT, LONG-AWAITED
plane ride to Japan reminded him how quickly he had risen from the ashes. When he had arrived in Australia in 1942, he was one of the most thoroughly defeated generals in history, his reputation in tatters, his nickname “Dugout Doug” for leaving behind a starving army of some 78,000 men on Bataan and Corregidor (albeit on President Roosevelt's orders). In a conference with FDR and Admiral Nimitz in July 1944, the odds were against him. The favored strategy was the navy's plan to bypass the Philippines and approach Japan directly across the Pacific. The man making the final decision was the president, a navy man. MacArthur was to be retired gracefully, at sixty-four. Instead, in a brilliant two-hour presentation with no notes whatsoever, MacArthur had dazzled the president and Nimitz with a plan so persuasive that he beat out Nimitz and talked himself back into the war. As the new commander, in eight months he won the land, air, and sea battle for Leyte, then Luzon and Manila, becoming the conqueror of more territory than any general since Darius I in 540 B.C. Oh, how he loved history!

Yet how much war had now changed! Had he not told George Kenney, his commander of the Far East Air Forces: “The winner of the next war is going to be some 2nd lieutenant who pulls the string on the A-bomb”? If technology was this powerful, what did the world need generals for? Were not men like him an endangered species, potential dinosaurs?

On his silver C-54, an hour had gone by. MacArthur got up and paced the aisle, due to land in two hours at Japan's Atsugi airfield, the training base for kamikaze pilots. He was confident there would be no trouble, because the emperor had so decreed. He also had confidence in his head general now on the ground making sure everything was okay: Robert Eichelberger, the man to whom he had entrusted the most important part of his Philippine campaign; “Take Buna, or not come back alive.”

Bob Eichelberger had come back alive, mission accomplished. He was MacArthur's kind of general, a man who went up to the front and personally inspected the situation instead of relying on subordinates and written reports. When promoted to brigadier general on the same day as his West Point classmate George Patton, Eichelberger received a wire from Patton saying they were “the two best damn officers in the U.S. Army”—an assessment with which MacArthur wholly agreed.

MacArthur and Eichelberger had something specific in common: Both had held the rarefied position of superintendent of West Point—one of the three positions in the army FDR stipulated that only he could fill (the other two being chief of staff and chief of engineers). Like MacArthur, Eichelberger had instituted major reforms to modernize the academy and toughen the training. Gone were the polite newspaper photographs of cadets jumping horses over hurdles or smiling at pretty girls at a dance—instead, there were “pictures of cadets making river crossings under smoke barrages.” Perhaps most important of all, the two men were passionate football fans and believed the sport to be an essential part of the West Point experience. For MacArthur, who never made the varsity team and had to settle for the position of manager, the highlight of the year was the Army-Navy game, when he would put on headphones, listen to the broadcast over long-range radio, and yell, “Go, Army, go!” So passionate was MacArthur that he had cabled the coach after Army won the 1944 game 24–7: “We have stopped the war to celebrate your magnificent success.” The reason Army was now a football powerhouse was Eichelberger, who—after two disastrous seasons and a 48–0 drubbing in one game—decreed that the Army cadets “deserved a team that would teach them to be good warriors.” Eichelberger recruited the legendary Earl “Red” Blaik, a West Point graduate then coaching at Dartmouth. More important, he single-handedly eliminated the rule stating no cadet could weigh more than 175 pounds. The regulation had been instituted by the U.S. surgeon general on the theory that life expectancy is greater for a slender man. While this may have been true from an actuarial viewpoint, it was one hell of a way to run a football team. Eichelberger won the argument by going down to Washington and pointing out that life expectancy in battle is just about the same for big or little men.

MacArthur hated bureaucratic thinking. Rules had their place, but adding more and more rules for the sake of convenience was a cowardly and lazy way to run an organization. His experience had taught him several precepts:

1.  There is no substitute for adequate preparation. “Had there been a trained and well equipped army of some 20,000 men at Bull Run, the Civil War never would have been fought,” he had told a 1933 congressional committee. A keen student of history, he was absolutely right: Had the Union won its first major battle, the Civil War would have been over in a day. “To build an army to be defeated by some other fellow's army is my idea of wasting a great deal of money,” he had told the committee, “and if you are defeated you will pay a billion dollars for every million you save in inadequate preparation.” MacArthur had won the post of Supreme Commander of the Pacific over Admiral Nimitz because he had been better prepared and made a better presentation to President Roosevelt, and he had won his campaign by studying every map thoroughly and figuring out how to surprise the enemy.

2.  In battle the greatest enemy is personal fear, those awful moments when stomach butterflies nervously flap their wings. The most important job of a leader in life-and-death situations is to communicate with his men and provide reassurance. In civilian jobs, obviously, such reassurance is not so germane, but in Japan, amid some seventy-eight million hostile people, it would be essential. He must use all means available to communicate, pronounce, and strengthen his command. He would do this by conducting his office in a forceful manner and using his powerful mastery of rhetoric.

3.  Speed and decisiveness are more important than mass. MacArthur's stunning conquest of the Philippines was due primarily to his speed and use of highly mobile forces to proceed from one island to the next. MacArthur always had to keep moving forward before bad weather set in or the enemy counterattacked with reinforcements. In civilian contexts the need for such urgency is rare, and managers generally value prudence over recklessness. In Japan he would be in a race against time before the inevitable resentment against military occupation set in. He would have only two years at best. His organization, a peacetime one, would have to run at a wartime pace.

4.  Put as little as possible in writing, especially rules and regulations. In war, for reasons of security, where possible he always issued his directives in person. The same for peacetime: He would eschew bureaucracy and especially its love of cover-your-butt written reports. One of his dicta as superintendent of West Point had read: “To take up a painful matter by letter or other written communication is not only the rankest cowardice but the ruination of morale.” The organization he would create would be a lean one managed by decision makers all the way down the line. In his view, “Too many executives indolently dispense with a problem by sending out a form letter or looking up a precedent in a book, an action any child could do.” His organization, SCAP, would be entirely different. It would be big, of course, but it would act like a lean one: He would make all the key decisions.

5.  Military occupations never last long because nobody likes living under another country's thumb. For the occupation of Japan to work, extraordinary efforts must be made to understand Japanese psychology and work with it to mutual advantage.

MacArthur was extremely proud of the job his cadre of officers was doing. Just ten days earlier they caught a horrendous mistake by Washington that could have upset the entire surrender and enabled the Japanese in several years to renounce it as improper and invalid. All because the provincial bureaucrats in Washington didn't know what everyone who knows a bit of French knows, the difference between
vous
and
tu
. One is a formal, impersonal form of “you,” the other is a more personal, intimate one. Many languages make this distinction, which English does not. In Japanese the distinction is as wide as a chasm.

The surrender documents prepared by Washington had used the wrong pronoun,
watakushi
, meaning “I”—a word never used by someone so important and dignified as the emperor. The proper word is
chin
, which translates, for lack of a better term, into “we.” Using the wrong word was more than just incorrect, more than just degrading and humiliating to the emperor: It was a mistake with profound legal implications.