Supreme Commander (32 page)

Flexibility

WARNED THAT GEORGE
Atcheson might be a State Department “pink,” MacArthur kept an open mind and gave the man a chance. On another occasion when he issued three directives and Mamoru Shigemitsu came to him and said it wouldn't work, MacArthur revoked them immediately and set about revising them. When George Kennan came to see him with new demands from Washington, MacArthur cooperated. On the other hand, when the Communists stepped over the line and went too far in taking advantage of his labor union reforms, he went after them vigorously. He did not bluff.

The son of a general, and a military man all his life, he was unlike most generals who “think of the last war.” He was always thinking ahead. Of all the World War II generals, he was the most aggressive in advocating new technologies in motorized transport, fast boats, and aircraft. He recognized the obsolescence of Clausewitz's “war is policy by other means” in a world of atom bombs, and became a fierce opponent of attempts to build up “offensive” military operations intended solely to intimidate.

Considerable credit for his success belongs to the Joint Chiefs in Washington, who gave him good plans to work with. But planning can only do so much. The idea of exhibition baseball games didn't come from Washington, or even from MacArthur, it came from a lowly lieutenant. Knowing a good idea when he saw one, MacArthur pounced on it—on the spot.

Persuasion

HE WAS AN
extremely hard worker. Officials who conferred with him were astounded how well prepared he was and how much he knew about their particular areas of expertise. He outdueled Nimitz in persuading the president how to wage the Pacific war. One on one with important visitors like Hirohito, Shigemitsu, Yoshida, McCloy, Kennan, Dodge, and Dulles, even lesser visitors like Choate and Griffin, he dazzled them all. At the Wake Island meeting, where neither protagonist was at his best, he still managed to astound his audience with his mastery of distances, temperatures, artillery, aircraft, and number and configuration of troops. Army Secretary Frank Pace, who had never met him before, concluded MacArthur “was indeed a military genius . . . the most impressive fellow I ever heard.” Added Truman's special counsel Charles Murphy: “I believed every word of it.”

His speeches to the Japanese public, beginning with the surrender signing, were inspirational and uplifting. He expressed big ideas—nothing pedantic or parochial. He was a serious man: He never started a speech with a silly joke or how honored he was to be there. He was a superb communicator, with a rich vocabulary and a mastery of cadence. He could be mesmerizing. Who else could write like he could? “He died unquestioning and uncomplaining, with faith in his heart and victory his end.”

As manager of a large enterprise, he communicated his wishes to his thousands of employees fully. Everybody knew what the boss wanted done, and they did it. He assembled a staff that covered all the political bases. He had liberals and New Dealers under Whitney, counterbalanced by conservatives under Willoughby. Somehow they all managed to work under one roof. There was remarkably little backstabbing. Why? Because everyone feared him, they knew they must act professionally.

A number of visitors, observing how loyal MacArthur's staff members were to him, accused him of surrounding himself with yes-men. This was a simplistic observation. MacArthur was so smart he usually was right. People who rebutted him were welcome so long as they knew their facts. Eisenhower stated that he argued with his commander for the nine years they were together and they had no problem.

Idealism

“WARRIOR RAGE” WAS
never part of his temperament. He was no William Tecumseh Sherman whose scorched-earth policies created Southern hatred that lasted for decades (as a Southerner, MacArthur was very much aware of this). He had none of the attitude of Admiral Halsey, who had posted signs in a Pacific seaport on the way to Japan: “Kill Japs. Kill Japs. Kill All the Lousy Bastards.” Like Ulysses Grant, he fought relentlessly like a warrior, but had no admiration for generals who incurred massive casualties and needless deaths in pursuit of victory. He set a standard for moral conduct toward an enemy who in war had shown hardly any honor at all. He was betting—correctly, it turned out—that in peace the enemy would respond positively to his overtures and cooperate.

But it wasn't easy. The Japanese military and
zaibatsu
—with the government looking the other way—were having a field day stealing wartime supplies for their personal aggrandizement and benefit, while the masses were starving. Corruption was rampant. Ishii was playing games. The Communists were making trouble at every opportunity. The economy was a shambles. No country in Southeast Asia wanted to trade, they all wanted revenge.

Yet throughout it all, MacArthur never wavered. He was imbued with a strong sense of idealism and purpose. It may be fashionable in certain political circles today to knock idealism as causing America to get into foreign policy excesses, but properly applied in places like Japan after World War II, idealism brought out the best in American influence. For the final word on MacArthur as a transformational leader, a comment by the historian Kazuo Kawai:

One reason for his influence on the Japanese was his dedicated sense of mission. The egoism fringed with mysticism, with which he regarded himself as the chosen instrument for the reformation and redemption of the Japanese people, might sometimes be ludicrous and sometimes irritating. But there was no mistaking the sincerity and intensity of his idealism. . . . He lifted the tone of the Occupation from a military operation, to a moral crusade.

26

Aftermath

Douglas MacArthur

F
OR THE NEXT
twelve years he lived a quiet life in a ten-room suite on the thirty-first floor of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, paying a subsidized rent of $450 a month (thanks to the hotel owner Conrad Hilton). His neighbor, living one floor above him, was his old boss Herbert Hoover. Down the hall was his friend Courtney Whitney. On either side of the private entrance to the Waldorf Towers on East Fiftieth Street, one will find a plaque, one for MacArthur, one for Hoover.

He took a position as chairman of Remington Rand (later Sperry Rand), based in Stamford, Connecticut, and commuted by limousine two or three times a week. In 1964 he published his memoir,
Reminiscences
, which became a huge bestseller.

He never went back to Japan.

He did not wish to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, as he put it, “surrounded by his enemies.” He made arrangements for a huge memorial and library to be built in Norfolk, Virginia, a navy town. In this memorial he and his wife are now buried. He died on April 5, 1964. Only one head of state came to his funeral: former Japanese prime minister Shigeru Yoshida. Truman and Eisenhower declined to attend.

Every year his name comes up when the National Football Foundation, which he was instrumental in establishing in 1947 (with Army coach Red Blaik and journalist Grantland Rice), announces the top college football team in the nation. The winning team receives the MacArthur Bowl, a twenty-five-pound silver trophy shaped like a football stadium. On the trophy are inscribed the words “There is no substitute for victory.” His legacy as a football fan lives on.

Jean MacArthur and Arthur MacArthur IV

JEAN WAS SIXTY-FOUR
when her husband died. She stayed in the Waldorf Towers and lived until 2000. She died at the age of 101. She received the Medal of Freedom in 1988 from President Reagan, the Legion of Merit from the Philippines in 1993, and a visit by Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko during their 1994 visit to the United States. Young Arthur MacArthur IV, who was seven at the start of the occupation and fourteen at the end, was one of the world's most publicized children (even appearing on the cover of
Life
magazine). He had no interest in following the illustrious career of his father and grandfather. He majored in music at Columbia and pursued a short career as a composer. He eventually drifted into the bohemian community of Greenwich Village, and faded from view. He is believed still to be living in New York, under an assumed name.

Japanese Constitution

MACARTHUR STARTLED MANY
people when he predicted that the Japanese constitution would last a hundred years. May 3, the day the constitution became effective, was not a big day in 1947, but it is now. It's Japan's national holiday, when people celebrate a document that has survived intact for nearly seven decades, exactly the way MacArthur left it. No major amendment or revision has been made.

Japanese History of World War II

FOR TWENTY YEARS,
in its published guidelines for the basic history textbooks for Japanese schools, Japan's Education Ministry devoted more than two hundred pages to World War II. In 1977 it abruptly reduced the guidelines to six pages, consisting mostly of photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a table of Japanese war dead, and photographs of the firebombing of Tokyo.

This effort to rewrite history and present itself as a victim drew an immediate international reaction. Virtually every nation that had fought against Japan protested vehemently. What about all the wartime atrocities and seventeen million people killed by Japan? The United States said nothing. (A visitor to Hiroshima will be surprised to see a monument to the dead of Auschwitz. It is Japan's effort to align itself with the Jews as the war's victims.)

The occupation, like war guilt, is widely considered to be best forgotten. A publicity booklet put out by the Ministry of Foreign Relations,
The Japan of Today
, makes no mention of the occupation at all: “In August 1945 an exhausted and battle-weary nation accepted the surrender terms of the Allied powers and by Imperial edict the people laid down their arms. Seven years later, in September 1951, Japan signed the peace treaty.”

State Shinto, banned by the occupation, continues to exist. The Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo had in front two huge bronze lanterns bearing friezes engraved with figures of Japanese war heroes and scenes of celebrated battles. The Shinto priests were ordered by the Americans to cover the reliefs with cement. Several years after the Americans left, in 1957, the cement was removed.

Shiro Ishii

THE ISHII STORY,
covered up during the occupation, remained in the shadows for many years. None of the major players of the occupation—MacArthur, Whitney, and Willoughby—mentioned it in their memoirs. Nor did Truman, Marshall, or Acheson. Even major books about MacArthur and Japan—William Manchester's
American Caesar
(1978), Clayton James'
The Years of MacArthur
(1985), John Dower's
Embracing Defeat
(2000), and Eiji Takemae's
Inside GHQ
(2002) contain only single lines, maybe a paragraph. The only information about Ishii is found in specialized books on bioterrorism.

Almost all of the latter, written many decades after the occupation, express horror at MacArthur's apparent lack of conscience and morality. It is easy to forget the circumstances at the time, plus no military commander would dare make such a decision on his own. MacArthur kicked the Ishii question upstairs to the Joint Chiefs and the White House, and they all went back and forth for two years before deciding what to do. The decision they made was unanimous; there was not a single voice of dissent. Leaders frequently have to do things they are not proud of.

A more interesting question, rarely asked by academics writing about MacArthur and the occupation, focuses on the amorality of the Japanese. After the 1951 peace treaty and the dissolution of SCAP, the Japanese government might have rescinded the immunity deal and gone after the Unit 731 scientists. It did not. In fact it did just the opposite: It leaned over backward: Many of these rogues attained high positions in academia and government, and some, like Ryoichi Naito, became CEOs of major pharmaceutical companies. One scientist, using his knowledge of frozen bodies, became chief advisor to a Japanese expedition to the South Pole, and another scientist became president of Japan's largest blood-processing facility. Ishii lived the rest of his life in quiet retirement, and died in 1967, at the age of sixty-seven, of natural causes. Rumors surfaced that the United States had brought Ishii to America to consult with scientists at Fort Detrick (originally called Camp Detrick). There is no evidence of this.

In 1982 China, protesting the rewriting of Japanese schoolbooks and elimination of any mention of atrocities, raised the case of germ warfare at Harbin. At Harbin it built a museum consisting of wax models of vivisections, which can be seen on the Internet under the heading “Pingfan.”

For a nation not known for facing unpleasant truths, the Japanese people pulled a major surprise that year. A book came out in Japan by Seiichi Morimura and Masaki Shimozato exposing, for the first time, the Unit 731 atrocities, called
The Devil's Gluttony
. It became a Japanese bestseller. Apparently the Japanese people have a greater capacity to face the truth than the Japanese government.

Defendants Convicted at the IMTFE Trial

SIX OF THE
eighteen sentenced to prison terms died in prison, one of them being General Umezu, the man who stopped Ishii and later signed the
Missouri
surrender. Shigemitsu was released in 1950. Most of the other prisoners were released in 1954. By 1958, all the remaining prisoners were free.

JFK and Vietnam

IN 1961 PRESIDENT
John Kennedy met MacArthur for the first time, expecting to find “a stuffy and pompous egocentric.” He was surprised: MacArthur was “one of the most fascinating conversationalists he had ever met, politically shrewd and intellectually sharp.” He followed up by inviting MacArthur to lunch at the White House. It lasted almost three hours. According to presidential aide Kenneth O'Donnell, MacArthur implored JFK to stay out of Vietnam and any other part of the Asian mainland; the so-called domino theory was a ridiculous concept in a nuclear age; to maintain military security, America's domestic problems merited far more priority than Vietnam. Kennedy came out of the meeting “stunned” and “enormously impressed.”

The Genie Comes Out of the Bottle

“NEVER PROPHESY, ESPECIALLY
about the future,” said the movie magnate Samuel Goldwyn. In 1950 Japan's future looked very uncertain. MacArthur was confident his efforts had been successful, but no one in his right mind could have predicted the economic juggernaut Japan would soon become. Certainly not John Foster Dulles, who advised the Japanese to export their cars to Asia because they would never be able to produce the type of vehicles that American consumers wanted.

By the mid-1960s, when Japanese cars and electronic goods appeared out of nowhere to capture global markets, it became obvious that the “boy of twelve” had grown up. During this time, the president of a Latin American country visited Japan and asked a Japanese minister the reasons for Japan's success. “The best way to obtain freedom and prosperity,” the minister replied, “was to wage war against the United States and lose it.”

By 1990, Japan had the world's second-strongest economy after the United States, twice the size of Germany's and eighteen times the size of Great Britain's. Today Japan is the world's largest creditor nation and ranks among the top three countries on virtually every economic indicator: size of economy, private financial assets, R&D, patents, industrial output, manufacturing output, and services. On quality of life, it ranks number one in life expectancy and among the top three in book and music sales and international spending.

Lessons from Japan on How to Run an Occupation in Iraq

SADLY, THEY WERE LOST.
Admirable though America's objectives were in going into Iraq and freeing the people from an oppressive regime, the effort fell short due to massive incompetence and fraud. Most regrettable was the total lack of planning, and the cavalier bet that American troops would be greeted with flowers. A bet is not a plan. Most unfortunate of all, the United States tried to undertake the mission without a heavyweight leader. As any executive recruiter knows, you don't undertake a difficult project if you don't have the right person to run it; otherwise it's best to stay away. As MacArthur would say, you don't undertake a war unless you absolutely have the resources to win it.

Iraq and Japan are obviously very different, but that's what good planning is supposed to do: analyze the situation and develop an appropriate strategy. Our occupation of Japan was one of the greatest feats of American leadership; our occupation of Iraq was the opposite. In 2003, as it prepared to invade Iraq in what hopefully would be no more than a few days, the United States had in its possession enough experience and know-how to write the definitive manual on how to run an occupation. Inexcusably and inexplicably, the United States ignored it. Nobody in the government bothered to open up a history book.

Yet one must not be so facile. MacArthur's greatest military triumph was Inchon. Virtually nobody thought it would work. The enemy was on a roll, the Allied forces were in bad shape. MacArthur knew he had to do something extraordinary and dramatic. To minimize the risks he developed a meticulous plan down to the last detail of a massive one-hour assault.

In 2006 in Iraq, the U.S. Army was in a similar situation: getting knocked about by the insurgents. Morale was low, Americans were losing hope. What to do? The Defense Department developed an equally detailed plan—an outrageous gamble—calling for an
increase
in troops, to be headed by the man in charge of counterinsurgency, Gen. David Petraeus. Washington was abuzz; more troops in Iraq was the last thing people wanted to hear. Yet President Bush authorized Petraeus to go ahead; he would take the heat if it failed. Naysayers in America—and they were legion, including presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—said the surge would never work. . . .

How Douglas MacArthur would have jubilated at the result. When a plan is carefully thought out and the upside far outweighs the downside, a massive risk can be called “prudent.”

So, too, was the American occupation of Japan. It was a gamble that few people thought would end well. Thanks to the supreme commander, it did.