Supreme Commander (4 page)

This time the soldiers obeyed.

MacArthur knew that when the emperor issued a pronouncement, it was called the Voice of the Crane (an imperial command that, like a crane's call, could still be heard in the sky after the bird had passed). In the 1945 Japanese deliberations about how to respond to the Potsdam Declaration, setting forth the terms of the Japanese surrender, the vote in the Supreme War Council had been 3–3, until the emperor cast the deciding vote in favor of surrender, 4–3 (in effect, 7–0). Hirohito recited his surrender announcement twice, each one a separate recording for the sake of security. It was the first time the emperor had ever spoken directly to the people. The emperor's statement was a masterpiece of pettifoggery:

We declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to ensure Japan's self-preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thoughts either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark on territorial aggrandizement. But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone, the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

Moreover, the enemy has begun to deploy a new and most cruel bomb. . . .

Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects, or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our imperial ancestors? This is the reason why we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Powers of the joint declaration.

We cannot but express the deepest regret to our allied nations of East Asia, who have consistently cooperated with the Empire towards the emancipation of East Asia. . . .

Full of half-truths and equivocations, the document contains not a word about “defeat,” “surrender,” or “capitulation.” The emperor says Japan was taking the initiative “in effecting a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure” (that is, agreeing to surrender). His comment on the bomb is equally self-serving: “The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of so many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.” In other words, Japan—the most militarist nation on earth, a nation that had killed seventeen million people, most of them innocent civilians—was saving the rest of the world. And to say Japan couldn't “continue to fight” because of the bomb was totally incorrect from a military point of view. Japan was getting clobbered in the last few months of the war: Everyone in the government knew it. All the bomb did was bring the war to a sharp conclusion.

Clearly SCAP had a job to do: Educate the Japanese people about the real facts.

As the plane neared Mount Fuji, MacArthur was awakened to admire the beautiful view. It was spectacular, but where was the snow? The snow-capped peak of Fujiyama, so familiar to everyone from photographs, postcards, and paintings, was bare. One of the generals grumbled that he was willing to bet the Japanese had melted the snow off on purpose.

After passing Mount Fuji the
Bataan
dipped down over Kamakura, the home of the great forty-four-foot-high Buddha built in 1352, more than a hundred years before Columbus discovered America. As the plane swung down toward Atsugi, MacArthur's chief aide, Gen. Courtney Whitney, was gripped by fear. “I could see numerous anti-aircraft emplacements. . . . Here was the greatest opportunity for a final and climactic act. The anti-aircraft guns could not possibly miss at this range. Had death, the insatiable monster of the battle, passed MacArthur by on a thousand fields only to murder him at the end?

“I think the whole world was holding its breath. But as usual he had been right,” wrote Whitney in his 1956 memoir. “He knew the orient. He knew the basic Japanese character too well to have thus gambled blindly with death.” What MacArthur was doing, Whitney knew, was listening to the Voice of the Crane.

The
Bataan
hit the runway. They had reached Atsugi. As the plane slowed to a stop, MacArthur gathered his generals around him and said in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone on the plane, “Gentlemen, I have an announcement to make.”

The men leaned forward, anxious to capture the general's every word. His message was brief: Men, remove your guns.

3

“The Most Courageous Act of the Entire War”

T
HE
BATAAN
LANDED
by mistake on the wrong end of the runway. Not an auspicious start for this all-important day, the beginning of MacArthur's reign. As a man used to dramatic landings on enemy beaches, he liked everything perfect. At least there was no gunfire—yet.

Gen. Hugh Johnson, the former head of Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration and 1933
Time
Man of the Year, had once marveled at MacArthur, one of his West Point classmates—a man, he said, “simply born without the emotion of fear.”

When Gen. Masahara Homma reported to Tokyo headquarters that with MacArthur in Corregidor he had possession of the bottle and MacArthur trapped inside the bottleneck, MacArthur replied with exuberance, “Homma may have the bottle—but I've got the cork!”

Sure enough, three months later MacArthur escaped Corregidor. When he returned to the Philippines, the Japanese sent to face him their best general, the conqueror of Singapore, General Yamashita. Other American generals might have cringed at the prospect of fighting the Tiger of Malaya, but not MacArthur. He was delighted: “I'm glad to meet the champion.” When the fight was over and MacArthur had recaptured Manila, the tiger was on the run. Any moment now he would have to come out of the woods and surrender. How sweet that would be.

Even sweeter was the moment about to begin on August 30. For the past forty-eight hours American troops had worked nonstop with the Japanese military to secure the Atsugi area. The kamikaze pilots had been rounded up and given their marching orders not to try anything glorious. The war was over: Stay home or you'll be arrested. Their three hundred planes on the airfield had been stripped of their propellers and the gas tanks drained. What a strange sight, all those planes looking naked without propellers, symbolizing Japan's helplessness.

No American claimed to understand Japan better than Joseph Grew, the U.S. ambassador from 1932 to 1941. In a CBS radio address after he returned to the United States, Grew said:

I have had many friends in Japan, some of whom I admired, respected and loved. They are not the people who brought on this war. As patriots they will fight for their Emperor and their country, to the last ditch if necessary, but they did not want this war and it was not they who began it. . . . But there is another side to the picture, the ugly side of cruelty, brutality, and utter bestiality, the ruthlessness and rapaciousness of the Japanese military machine which brought on this war. That Japanese military machine and military caste and military system must be utterly crushed.

How to explain this dichotomy between the two Japans? It had to do with the old Japanese expression, “When dogs are frightened, they bark, and the more they are frightened, the louder they bark.” In his memoirs, published in 1944, Grew wrote:

The naïveté of the Japanese is really amazing. They love high-sounding formulas and slogans to cover whatever they want and intend to do, with the idea of imparting to their plans the most perfect righteousness, lulling even themselves into the belief that their acts are wholly righteous. . . . A Japanese friend said to me the other day: “The trouble with you Anglo-Saxons is that you regard and deal with the Japanese as grown-up people, whereas the Japanese are but children and should be treated like children. An encouraging word or gesture immediately inspires confidence.”

MacArthur was too sophisticated a man to take this literally, but he knew what Grew was referring to. Japan was an underdeveloped, feudal society controlled by a militarist government, like a child raised by a brutal parent. Give people a taste of democracy, give the child room to grow, and you will have the kind of people Grew had come to like and admire. As a general MacArthur knew the value of intelligence: 80 to 90 percent of winning the battle is figuring out what the other side's moves will be. Get into the head of your enemy.

Of course it was easy to lose your temper and blow up when Japanese newspapers like
Nichi Nichi
Shimbun
came out with articles charging America with acting “like a prostitute, whispering on dark corners,” but what was really going on here? The solution was not to come down hard on frightened people—the atom bombs had been enough—what was needed was a show of empathy to give them self-respect and confidence. He must give the Japanese a sense of security.

What better way than to arrive unarmed?

 

THE DOOR OF
the plane opened, and there stood Douglas MacArthur at his photogenic best, hat at a rakish angle, dark aviator sunglasses, corncob pipe in his mouth, about to descend the stairs and set foot on his realm like a god coming out of the skies. MacArthur, as he always did, had been careful to instruct his ground forces to have photographers ready. A lot of film would be used that day, more than a hundred rolls. A moment in history, to survive, must be photographed vividly.

The heavily armed Japanese soldiers, fingers twitching on the triggers of their rifles at the slightest appearance of trouble from a kamikaze pilot or some angry warrior, were stunned. They were even more amazed as numerous generals poured out of the plane, all smiling as if they were arriving at a college reunion. They were totally unarmed. Winston Churchill, when he heard about it, called it “the most daring and courageous act of the entire war.”

Waiting to greet MacArthur was the head of the vaunted Eighth Army, the force now in charge of Japan, Robert Eichelberger, the brilliant general who had won Buna.

MacArthur thrust out his arm and gripped Eichelberger hard: “Bob, this is payoff time.”

The cameras clicked away furiously. This was what Buna was for.

Observed the Japanese historian Kazuo Kawai: “It was a masterpiece of psychology, which completely disarmed Japanese apprehensions. From that moment, whatever danger there might have been of a fanatic attack on the Americans vanished in a wave of Japanese admiration and gratitude.”

So far, so good.

The party moved forward to where lunch was being served. A young American sergeant reached for his rifle to present arms, the customary salute when a soldier has a weapon. Only problem was, the poor fellow was so nervous and intimidated he picked up the first thing his hand reached for. The supreme commander stopped and stared at the sergeant holding a bamboo stick in his arm, transfixed like a pillar of salt, knowing he had screwed up big-time. MacArthur's stern countenance slowly turned into a smile: “Son, I think you're in the wrong army”—and he gave him a wink.

The head Japanese general had a lot more to be worried about: something goes wrong, the Japanese prime minister had warned him bluntly, you commit suicide. Lt. Gen. Seizo Arisue, director general of Japanese intelligence and chief of what euphemistically might be called “the welcoming committee,” nervously motioned the conquerors to the carefully laid-out tables. A scrumptious buffet had been prepared. He hoped the Americans would appreciate the miracles he pulled off, getting his hands on so much food in a destitute country . . . not to mention a quiet airfield, free of gunfire.

Col. Sidney Huff, chief of counterintelligence and the man in charge of security, suddenly stepped forward, panic-stricken. It was fine for MacArthur to pull off this PR stunt arriving unarmed, but what was this orange juice all about? The Japanese waiters were offering trays with glasses of juice. Huff grabbed the first glass before anyone else and quickly gulped it. He put his hand to his heart, then he felt his stomach while everyone watched, some of them starting to laugh—they knew the Japanese wouldn't dare do something so stupid as resort to poison. Lieutenant General Arisue also grabbed a glass and raised it to the Americans, as if making a welcoming toast. The orange juice passed the test, and everyone started drinking.

The buffet, also vigorously tested by Huff's men, was excellent, and the Americans enjoyed themselves thoroughly. After lunch they gathered for a lengthy photo-op. Ever the peacock, MacArthur stayed at the base for an extra half hour, posing for photographers.

It was now time to push on to Yokohama. The Japanese army had assembled a motorcade of fifty dilapidated cars, mostly coal burning—the best they could find, led by an old beat-up red fire engine. For MacArthur the Japanese had come up with a Lincoln. The Americans boarded the cars, and the procession moved forward. Instead of an eighteen-mile trip taking a half hour, this one took an excruciating two hours, interrupted by the fire engine breaking down every ten minutes and starting up again. Once in a while one of the cars sputtered to a halt, a vivid precursor of what happens when a country runs out of oil. A Japanese ran over and dumped some more coal into the engine in the trunk (apparently there was such a severe shortage of petroleum in Japan that the gasoline engines in the front couldn't be used).

For the stunned Americans—who had ever seen a coal-fired car before?—the biggest shock was the lineup of 30,000 Japanese soldiers guarding the road. Armed with bayonets and rifles, they stood with their backs to the motorcade, both for security and to show the same respect to the Americans they habitually showed the emperor.

Just a week earlier, when the emperor had issued his radio announcement that Japan would surrender, a group of Japanese militarists had tried to shoot their way into the palace. Thirty-eight people had been killed. The next day, in a separate incident, ten young men calling themselves the Sonjo Gigun—the Righteous Group for Upholding Imperial Rule and Driving Out Foreigners—had seized a hill within sight of the American Embassy and set off five grenades, killing themselves. Might similar militarists be embedded in the 30,000?

It was like running the gauntlet, said one of the generals: Any one of these guys can turn around and shoot us. Or toss a grenade. MacArthur was firm in his response; there could be no other way: “The gauntlet must be run.”

The two-hour journey passed without incident. At the end of the day MacArthur and other senior members of his staff had dinner in a small dining room off the lobby in the New Grand Hotel, 80 percent destroyed in the war. Steak was served. Whitney warned that the steak might be poisoned. MacArthur laughed it off: “No one can live forever.” The next course was fish, a most unappetizing-looking concoction, embalmed in a gray sauce. For the next twelve days the hotel would serve the same fish, first with brown sauce, then a yellow sauce, and finally a plain white sauce. It became so depressing that many of the officers looked for any possible excuse to go aboard one of the U.S. Navy ships in the harbor and eat in the mess hall.

That day, in Tokyo, thirty-two members of secret societies committed hara-kiri in public to atone for “their inability to win the war.”

The next morning at breakfast MacArthur ordered eggs. It turned out that the hotel kitchen had no eggs. Men of the Eleventh Airborne rushed into the city looking for eggs; after an hour, they returned—with just one egg. MacArthur realized he had a humanitarian crisis on his hands: The Japanese had no food. Making a mental note, he issued his first order of the occupation, the first of the 2,185 orders later called SCAPINS (SCAP instructions): Troops were forbidden to eat local food. They were to eat only what the navy and air force brought in. Local food must be reserved for the locals who desperately needed it.

He had been in Japan only one day, and already the occupation had a huge task on its hands nobody ever thought of: food. He finished eating his fried egg and left to start working on preparations for the big day coming up the day after tomorrow.