by James Webb
MORE PRAISE FOR
THE EMPEROR’S GENERAL
“Webb has the inside knowledge of military life to make this epic story come to life.… The lessons of war and peace that emerge from this novel are timely, and should make it required reading.”
—The Sun, Baltimore
“If you miss this novel, you’ve whisked past an insight into history in Webb’s giving flesh and substance to the skeletons of myth and suspicion.”
—Stars and Stripes
“With The Emperor’s General, Jim Webb cements his reputation as an extraordinarily gifted storyteller. He excels in mining the rich veins of history to invest his fiction with the drama of great events, and to set a grand stage on which his protagonist must reconcile the call of duty and the demands of his conscience. An engrossing, moving, and splendid book.”
—Senator John McCain
“Webb makes winning the Japanese peace look every bit as challenging and tragic as winning the war.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A seamless tapestry of history and fiction … a truly enthralling work.”
—The Hartford Courant
“An insightful account of a part of history that many may be unfamiliar with, but still lives with us today … An excellent addition to anyone’s collection of World War II fiction.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“A heroic story about one of the least understood and most important of America’s Cold War accomplishments: bring democracy to the people of Japan. Jim Webb is one of our country’s great storytellers. The Emperor’s General is at least as good as Fields of Fire.”
—Senator Robert Kerrey
THE EMPEROR’S GENERAL
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Broadway hardcover edition published 1999
Bantam paperback edition / January 2000
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1999 by James Webb
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56745-1
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue: February 23, 1997
Part One: October 1944–August 1945
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Two: September 1945–February 1946
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue: February 23, 1997
A Special Acknowledgment
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
During the writing of this book, life’s rhythms claimed their casualties and the mourning of those passings could not help but find their places, however subliminal, in the words that the author chose. And so I must especially lament:
JAMES HENRY WEBB, SR., 1917–1997, my hero, mentor, and forever friend. Fierce but shyly tender, self-educated singer of grand poems, proud to the grave of the uniform in which he served our nation as pilot and missile pioneer, he constantly amazed me with a mammoth intellect that was never fully recognized or adequately rewarded, other than through its impact on those he left behind. I miss you, Dad.
PETER BRAESTRUP, 1929–1997, quiet, gruff, and earnest, possessed of an unbending honesty, among the best and brightest who from Yale served Corps and country and was wounded as a rifle platoon commander in Korea. A fearless combat correspondent, the unsung Ernie Pyle of the Vietnam War, and a great friend.
THOMAS W. MARTIN, JR., 1947–1997, squad leader and truth teller, who fought the enemy in Asia and then the prison of a wheelchair that became its legacy, yielding early into the earth, but, like my father, leaving behind an insistence that the truth can be a majority of one.
And as the days unfold into years that are forever lost, each morning I awaken and remember that bright, faraway Asian hotel, which if life had been different, might have been my refuge in the cruel November that steadily approaches.
And so it goes …
“Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or is still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion.”
—T. S. ELIOT, “GERONTION”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel is an attempt to bring context to a series of historical events that occurred separately from one another, but became intertwined as the United States and Japan sought to move from the hostilities of World War Two into a new era of cooperation and interdependence. The historical events—the rapes of Nanking and Manila by Japanese troops, Douglas MacArthur’s maneuverings as he solidified his role as the proconsul of Japan, the intense negotiations between MacArthur and the Japanese imperial government over war crimes accountability and the drafting of a comprehensive new Japanese constitution, and the trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita by a hastily drawn military commission—did occur, and the author has labored to recount them with accuracy. The major historical characters who move the novel did exist, and again the author has labored to retell their involvement in historical events with factual correctness.
But the author wishes to emphasize that this is above all a novel. The impact of one set of historical facts on another involves the author’s own deduction and surmise. Conversations with the fictional characters, and many of the internal motivations laid out in the novel that drive historically known decisions, are the product of the author’s imagination. And all characters, other than the well-known historical figures who inhabit these pages, are fictional. Many people served in the United States Army during and after World War Two. Any resemblance to any other person, either living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
PROLOGUE
FEBRUARY 23, 1997
Morning
I cannot even think of Manila during the war without drawing in my mind a picture of General Douglas MacArthur. And I cannot do justice to the memory of either him or the war without first visiting Manila Bay.
It was my first order of business on Sunday. I had arrived the evening before, heading from the airport to a new hotel in the business district of Makati, six miles from old Manila. The travel agent who booked my trip had urged me to stay in Makati, praising its newfound
opulence at the hands of Chinese and Japanese investors. She did not steer me wrong. Even though I had been in Manila only a few years before, the bright lights of Makati amazed me. A sparkling circular pool marked the horseshoe entrance to the Esmeralda Hotel, at the center of which was a brightly lit fountain that spewed its geysers twenty feet into the air. I was greeted by smiling, white-coated attendants and in the marbled lobby was passed along to an entire squad of greeters, bag lifters, and credit card processors.
They were all very pleasant, and indeed well trained. It was as if I had reached an oasis imported from Las Vegas or possibly Hong Kong. Dinner was exquisite. The Esmeralda was a lovely hotel, but to me it was not very Filipino.
The next morning I hired a car, and even on a Sunday we crawled for more than an hour through a vast mass of congestion and construction just to reach downtown Manila. Stuck in the traffic, my heart played little tricks on me. In February 1945 our military forces had come into Manila along the forerunner of this same road. In front of us, the steadily retreating Japanese had burned and raped and murdered in a final orgy of certain defeat, leaving a hundred thousand corpses strewn like foul garbage among pyres that had once been homes. The sight had filled me with hatred. But Manila, fecund and resilient like its people, had recovered, and Japanese businesses had led the way. The metropolitan suburbs had grown into one congealed, metropolitan morass. Ten million people now choked the streets and byways of the city.
Finally I reached downtown Manila and then the American embassy, its high walls and wide lawn and square white buildings connecting me at once to that other era. Not so long ago the embassy had been its very own oasis, an isolated splendor now lost to the glassy modernity of Hiltons and Nikkos and Esmeraldas. After a little negotiation I managed permission to walk along its flat, sprawling side yard to where a low wall overlooked Manila Bay.
I strode quickly in the lush grass, at first near the buildings and then across the helicopter pad, and finally in the rear where it approached the vistas of the mammoth bay. My chin was raised like a bird dog’s and my heart was racing with excitement, so anxious was I to be near the bay. My strong gait seemed to surprise the young foreign service officer who had been assigned to accompany me. But I was once a fine athlete and have always been sturdy, even in these later years. And no matter. I was mindless of him anyway, uninterested in contemporary travelogue, caught up in a moment long ago.
He persisted, seeking to make conversation. “Are we in a race, Ambassador Marsh? The bay’s not going to disappear, you know.”
He was certainly no Asia hand. I pointed to the sky above the bay. “How long have you been out here? Can you not yet read East Asian weather?”
Indeed, the rain was coming. The air clung to me like a gentle blanket as we walked. The sun fell slowly away behind a thick, viscous bank of pillowy grey clouds, leaving them pink around the edges. The wind started blowing in hot and horizontal from the bay, like the breath of some unseen dragon. I knew from other days that I had better hurry, because soon the sky would become a torrent and the streets would flow like rivers and the bay would disappear from view as completely as if it had become full night.
I had not yet met the new ambassador. A sharp, kind woman who was not yet born the first time I had caught this gaze, she had greeted me in her office despite the holiday, and then insisted that I have full run of the embassy grounds. I am retired now, hardly worthy of such attention, but an unspoken, common bond exists among most ambassadors, present and former, that allows these little courtesies. Since I had represented our country in three different Asian nations over the course of my career, she had graciously overlooked the suddenness of my unannounced arrival and insisted that I tour her grounds, even assigning me this young, irritatingly eager seeing-eye escort. Walking with him toward the wall I decided that his probable assignment was to scoop up my corpse and ring some magic bell should I collapse from the heat.
But it was he who flinched and squirmed under the steaming sky, not I. By the time we reached the wall he was sweat-drenched, working to hide his irritation at having been called away from his air conditioner. He stood impatiently, as if trying to decide how to be useful, then started pointing out hotels and skyscrapers and ships out in the bay, all the proud and promising changes along Manila’s new horizons. And finally I could take it no more.
“Young man,” I said, folding my arms and turning my face out to the sea, “if you don’t mind, I would like to be left quiet and alone.”
Somewhere behind me he disappeared, fading like a polyester ghost toward the embassy, no doubt glad to be relieved of this dubious mission. My eyes did not follow him, nor did I say good-bye. Instead I stood transfixed, consumed not merely by what was before me but by all that I had seen and lost since I first had held this vision. I was looking out into the bay, but I was swallowed like Jonah into the belly of a different time, another world, indeed another person who used to bear my name.
Far against the horizon I could see a faint nipple on the sea that I knew was the island of Corregidor. To its right in my vision, now fading through the mist of the distantly approaching rain, was the Bataan Peninsula. The two landmarks are still sacred to me, an old soldier’s wailing wall. In the cruel months following Japan’s invasion of the Philippines, the overwhelmed American and Filipino soldiers fought a rear-guard action down the peninsula, ending up in a last-ditch defense on Corregidor itself, all the while hoping that reinforcements and resupply might somehow arrive and free them from their devastation. Reinforcements did arrive, but more than two years too late. They had been forced to surrender, then march back up the peninsula under the probing bayonets of the conquering Japanese, and then after that had still waited, starving and tormented in disease-ridden prisoner camps.
If the reinforcements were late, it is fair to say that they arrived when they did only because General Douglas MacArthur had made a promise to these defenders, his own soldiers, when he escaped from Corregidor on a PT boat, and he did not forget them after he traveled to Australia to assume command of the Allies’ southern advance. Once the Philippines were reinvaded MacArthur made a point of liberating the archipelago in its entirety, single-handedly winning a debate against more senior officers who were calling for him to take only a chunk of the distant island of Mindanao for bases and then proceed northward to Formosa.
I did not fight in Bataan or Corregidor, never underwent their terrors, but I was with him after the liberation of Manila as we traveled to the filthy, stench-saturated prisons at Muntinglupa and Santo Tomas, where he greeted the survivors among the soldiers he had left behind. They seemed half human as they stood in their hollow-eyed, pointy-boned, gaunt thousands, staring at their old commander as if he had returned from the dead to anoint them for their suffering. He was at his best on those visits, filled with emotion and bold prose, and when MacArthur was at his best he was better than anyone then alive. They lined up in a pitiful formation for him at Santo Tomas and as he toured their ranks and heard their ragged cheers I understood at least a part of his obsession.
Nearer to me as I stood looking at the bay, perhaps only a mile up to my right, was the elegant old Manila Hotel, which for many years before the war had been MacArthur’s home. Another memory leaped out at me as I peered up the coastline, watching it—the General running up the hotel steps toward his old penthouse as the battle to recapture Manila still raged around us, joining a machine-gun team that was retaking the hotel. His eyes were on fire with fear. It was not fear of death that shone on his face; I was with him constantly during those long months and I never saw him flinch from the thump and crackle of enemy guns. It was the kind of nauseating dread that one feels when the symbols of his very life are being destroyed.
The Japanese, who had taken over his penthouse and used it as a command post, had set it afire as they retreated. Smoke billowed down the stairs as we climbed them. Gunfire erupted steadily, without warning. Bodies of shot enemy soldiers tumbled and fell down the landings. MacArt
hur had raced forward, impervious. In the living room of his former home the General stepped over a just-dead Japanese colonel who was oozing blood onto the charred carpet and surveyed the rubble and ashes that once had been his defining treasures. He had labored for three years to save them and had arrived only a few minutes too late. Pointing to the smoldering library, where not one book had survived, he managed a wry and yet prophetic observation.
“All the treasures that define us have been destroyed, Jay. Do you understand what I mean? It will never be the same after this war is over.”
I did not understand him then, but I do now. For it was also MacArthur who insisted that the history of the world for the next thousand years would be written in Asia. Looking at the burned books, he had seen beyond all our lives.
I turned yet again, my eyes searching beyond the embassy buildings and then further landward, knowing that nearby were Sampaloc and Quiapo and after that Quezon City. And for the first time I felt the weight of my years and the utter loneliness of a dream that but for my own foolishness would certainly have happened. Yes, I was a young man here. And yes, I was in love. And I did not handle it well. It is an old story, unless you’ve never lived it.
And so I had a mission to fulfill on this trip, one that I had struggled with for more than fifty years. Now that my bones were rattling and my life was mostly lived, I was finally going to see her again. I held no great hopes for this visit, other than perhaps to catch a glimpse of what had been my better self.
Thinking of her I found myself again becoming angry, and I knew the anger was directed within. It was a recent phenomenon for me, this bitter disappointment with the man I had become. Make no mistake, I lived an enormously successful life after World War Two. But there were prices to pay, and I began paying them at Quezon City.
