Supreme Commander (5 page)

4

Sword Sheathed, but Gleaming in Its Scabbard

The right use of a sword is that it should subdue the barbarians while lying gleaming in its scabbard. If it leaves its sheath it cannot be said to be used rightly. Similarly the right use of military power is that it should conquer the enemy while concealed in the breast.

—
IEYASU TOKUGAWA
(1543–1616),

the greatest shogun of them all

 

S
EPTEMBER 2, 1945,
would be MacArthur's day of glory, the day Japan signed the surrender. Ever since the day after Pearl Harbor, this was the moment he had been waiting for.

Most Americans thought of Pearl Harbor, December 7, as the biggest day of the war. Not MacArthur. He had his own demons to exorcise.

For him it was December 8, when he had failed to follow Gen. George Marshall's warning about a potential attack in the Philippines. On that day—only nine hours after MacArthur had heard about Pearl Harbor and been ordered to go on full alert—the Japanese Air Force had found MacArthur's B-17s lined up on the airfield like sitting ducks and bombed them to bits. Had he not been such a high-ranking general and able to obfuscate the incident with vague and uncorroborated claims about orders passed down the line and mysteriously not obeyed, he might well have been court-martialed for dereliction of duty (like Admiral Kimmel and Admiral Short at Pearl Harbor). It was only because FDR was so desperate for some good news to give the American public that the whole incident had been papered over, no formal investigation undertaken, and MacArthur given the Medal of Honor to make the American public feel proud that America was fighting back. For MacArthur, it had been a close call. He must never underestimate the Japanese again.

But he had. He had encountered Japanese fighting prowess at Corregidor and suffered humiliating defeat, forcing him to flee to Australia. Two years later he had returned, conducting a brilliant campaign covering seven thousand miles and attacks on over forty islands without a single defeat. He was now a hero, acknowledged by Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Gen. George Marshall, and Field Marshals Bernard Montgomery and Sir Alan Brooke as the ablest American commander of World War II. Some even called him the greatest American general since Ulysses Grant. And what was MacArthur most proud of? Not that he had captured so much territory and killed so many men, but that he had lost so few of his own. In fact, he had lost fewer men than Eisenhower had in a single battle, the Battle of the Bulge. Great generals are not butchers.
*
 

He was a warrior. There was the famous scene at Leyte where he had stood over a pile of dead Japanese soldiers and exclaimed with glee, “A good Jap is a dead Jap!” He had witnessed the atrocities performed by Japanese soldiers in Manila, raping women, impaling babies on their bayonets, treating prisoners like vermin. He had seen the men he left behind in Bataan, emerging from captivity like walking skeletons—at least those who were still alive. He had every reason to hate the “Japs” for what they had done, but he could not. Warriors have a code of honor. It was now time for peace, and like Tokugawa he would keep his sword sheathed in its scabbard, gleaming and ready to flash at a moment's notice.

He had a job to do on this day: to send the Japanese a message. A message so powerful they would never forget it.

MacArthur thought Eisenhower was sometimes a bore: Eisenhower who had been his underling in the Philippines for seven years, Eisenhower who had never fought a battle on the front lines or risked his life as he had, Eisenhower the typical “desk general.” At the critical once-in-a-lifetime moment when Germany formally surrendered, Eisenhower had performed the signing in a remote schoolhouse at three in the morning, observed by no one, allowing the defeated Germans to slink away in the dark of night. What a cop-out way to treat an enemy! What a moment of history missed!

What's the point of history if the world can't see it?

He, Douglas MacArthur, would show the world how to conduct a surrender. But he would astonish and impress everyone. Like Grant at Appomattox, he would not humiliate the enemy as everyone expected—he would be respectful, he would uplift them. It would be a huge ceremony, like the coronation of a king, promising better days to come.

Most important of all, he would make absolutely sure they never forgot who won.

In all the armaments of war, nothing is quite so imposing as a battleship, a big, cold, gray battleship with huge guns threatening the skies. For two weeks now, Douglas MacArthur had planned every single last detail of this event. He had to make a lot of people happy, make them think they were vital. To keep the navy happy, he had asked for their best battleship, and President Harry Truman—a lowly captain in World War I—had jumped in and provided the
Missouri
, named after the president's home state and christened by none other than his daughter, Margaret. Again to keep the navy happy, MacArthur had made Bull Halsey the official master of ceremonies, though of course there could be only one lead actor in the play. To remind the Japanese of the brutality they had inflicted in the war, he arranged for two men to be standing on the other side of the desk, facing the Japanese delegation: Jonathan Wainwright, the walking-skeleton general who had endured so much suffering in Bataan, and the equally emaciated Arthur Percival, the British general who had surrendered Singapore.

The Japanese surrender would be signed by two people from Japan, one representing the military, the other representing the government. The surrender document would be brutal and short—just one page long, with a second page for the eleven signatures of the entities participating. To sign for the office of SCAP was MacArthur; to sign for the United States was Admiral Nimitz, the man who had sought the job MacArthur now held. Surrounding the ship would be the greatest naval armada the world had ever seen, with massive cannons ready to unleash their firepower should there be any trouble. Photographers would be present, along with fifteen hundred soldiers and seamen enjoying the fruits of their hard-earned victory, witnessing the spectacle as if in a Roman forum, only there was to be no cheering whatsoever. Everyone invited had been thoroughly instructed to be totally quiet and not say a word, ever. Twenty minutes of dead silence can make twenty minutes seem like a long, long time.

It was now almost nine o'clock in the morning, and everyone was assembled outside. MacArthur was in his cabin, getting his final thoughts together, when there was a gentle knock on the door: “General, we are ready.” One moment, said MacArthur, as the messenger turned around and his footsteps retreated into the distance. MacArthur rose from his chair, his hands shaking, walked over to the toilet in the bathroom, leaned down, and threw up.

 

THE LINEUP OF
important American naval officers on board the
Missouri
was notable for the absence of the number-three man, Adm. Raymond Spruance, the winner of the Battle of Midway and soon to be commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Nimitz, fearful that rather than surrender, the Japanese might attack the
Missouri
and kill all the high-ranking Americans aboard, had ordered Spruance to stay in Okinawa and take command of the navy if need be. At the most memorable moment of his career, all Spruance could do was listen to the radio, praying he would never be called.

 

IT HAD BEEN
a wearying morning for Toshikazu Kase. The forty-two-year-old Japanese diplomat, a graduate of Amherst College and a research fellow at Harvard in 1927, had been up since 4:30. Unlike MacArthur, he had no role other than to simply observe. But because of his fluency in English and his trusted role as secretary to the foreign minister, he had been assigned to prepare a report on the day's proceedings to be delivered personally to the emperor.

At 5:00 a.m. four cars joined up to leave Tokyo, a city of desolation. The skyline was gone, reduced to clusters of bomb-ravaged villages. One million of the city's 1,650,000 buildings had been demolished. Debris clogged the streets, and piles of rotting garbage polluted and fouled the air, a dark haze at this early hour. Two-thirds of the 1940 population of nearly seven million were missing, many of them presumably dead. Cats and dogs roamed the streets, looking for food. When daylight rose, children, too, would be scavenging. Half the city's 250 square miles had been wiped out by fire. From the piles of bricks and twisted metal people had assembled thousands of shantytown structures pretending to offer shelter from the rain and cold in a desperate bid for survival—after reading the millions of pamphlets that had rained down on the city blaming their plight on the militarism of people like the men in the four cars.

The cars sped quickly on the war-torn road to Yokohama. Inside were eleven Japanese on their way to the
Missouri
for the signing. They must move quickly, stealthily, in the still-dark light lest assassins were waiting by the roadside to kill them. A defeated nation is an angry land, and millions of people had guns and explosives. “There were few men on the road,” observed Kase, “and probably none recognized us.” Which was just as well. “Our journey had been kept wholly secret lest extremists attempt to impede us by violence.”

Yet most of the road was unpaved, forcing them to slow down to five miles an hour lest one of the cars hit a big pothole in the road and have a flat tire or break its suspension. There was no conversation in any of the cars, just glum silence in the shadow of defeat. “Were we not sorrowing men come to seek a tomb for a fallen empire?” thought Kase. Had not the time come, as the emperor put it, to “bear the unbearable”?

Two men in the small procession of cars were particularly nervous. Their identity deliberately had been kept top secret. Had their identity become widely known as the assigned signers of the surrender document, they could well be waylaid and killed on the spot. All the other men in the cars knew this, fearing, too, for their own lives. So when they finally arrived at 7:00 a.m. in Yokohama and saw the heavily armed soldiers of General Eichelberger's Eighth Army, they were much relieved. They had made it.

After an hour's wait the cars were instructed to follow a jeep and proceed down streets guarded by American sentries, now armed with rifles and bayonets. By now the Japanese officials were extremely nervous. They were not aware that most of the American soldiers bore little vengeance, that only the day before three American infantrymen patrolling the streets had stumbled on a woman knocked down by a streetcar, jumped out of their jeep, rushed to her aid, and taken her to a hospital. Japanese bystanders were amazed. Equally amazed were the Japanese kids whenever the GIs flashed a smile and tossed them pieces of gum and candy. This was not the rapine and pillage they had been told to expect.

At the dockside were four destroyers marked A, B, C, and D. The Japanese flags were removed from the cars, and the military members of the delegation were ordered to leave their samurai swords behind. They boarded destroyer B, the
Lansdowne
, and proceeded fourteen miles out into Tokyo Bay where they met what Kase would describe as “a majestic array” of gray warships, “the mighty pageant of the Allied navies that so lately went forth into battle, now holding back their swift thunder and floating like calm seabirds on the waters.” No fewer than 260 ships were in the harbor, almost all American: aircraft carriers, destroyers, battleships, cruisers, and minesweepers.

Equally gray was the sky. It was overcast, the sun nowhere to be seen, but at least it wasn't raining. Protected by the flotilla of many ships, and planes circling overhead, sat the
Missouri
. Destroyer B slowed to a stop so a motor launch could take on the Japanese and deliver them to their assigned places. Coming on board to greet them was Colonel Mashbir, MacArthur's chief translator. The Japanese delegates were very anxious; they had no idea how they should present themselves when they got up to the deck and met their victors. Should they salute, bow, or shake hands? Should they smile? Mashbir said the military members of the group should salute, the others should take off their hats and bow. There was to be no handshaking; this was not a meeting of equals but a formal occasion: “I suggest that all of you wear a
shivan kao
[neutral face].”

There was a problem. The head delegate for the Japanese government, Mamoru Shigemitsu, had a wooden leg, so he could not handle the stairs leading from the ship down to the launch bobbing in the water. The captain of the
Lansdowne
quickly rigged up a bosun's chair to let the man over the side. Foreign Minister Katsuo Okazaki asked Mashbir if he would kindly prevent the photographers from taking pictures of Shigemitsu “in this particularly undignified position.” Mashbir turned to the photographers and asked them to put down their cameras, out of respect. They did so.

One of the Japanese delegates, Gen. Yoshijiro Umezu, made a deliberate point of not helping Shigemitsu walk. But an American gunnery officer, Horace Bird—knowing it was not right that the man be unnecessarily humiliated—rushed forward and offered the struggling diplomat his assistance.

Now in the launch, the eleven Japanese—“diplomats without flag and soldiers without sword”—stared in awe at the ship towering twenty stories above them. At the top fluttered the Stars and Stripes, claimed by many to have been the same flag that had flown over the White House the day of Pearl Harbor and been hoisted over Rome in 1943 and Berlin in 1945 (not true, it turned out, but it made a good story).

The guns were awesome. The Japanese men looking up could only feel the horror of war, whose evidence lay strewn throughout Tokyo. They would have been even more depressed if they had spoken to the guards and learned that each of the guns weighed a massive 230,000 pounds, and that despite carrying the weight of nine of these guns, the
Missouri
had engines so powerful it could travel forty miles an hour—and twenty miles an hour backward: In other words this monster could move backward faster than most Japanese ships could move forward.