The Emperor's General

by James Webb

  And I paid further at Los Banos. I turned to look southward, where perhaps thirty miles away at a camp near that town, in the middle of the night five months after the war was done, I had been forced to witness the hanging of General Tomoyuki Yamashita. It had been my price for questioning MacArthur’s almighty judgment and his motives. I had seethed mightily as the trapdoor sprung, but it was indeed a brilliant way of reinforcing his infallibility, that I should be ordered to watch and report on all the minutiae of the very action that I had dared to question, and then be rewarded for my acquiescence and continued silence.

  Fifty-one years ago, to this very day.

  Yes, I learned the importance of symbols and anniversaries from General Douglas MacArthur. And of arrogance and intimidation, both useful tools.

  Facing Los Banos, I noticed that my polyestered, seeing-eye foreign service officer escort had returned and had been waiting for me under the eaves of the white embassy building. The young fool caught my gaze and jogged out to me as if summoned. There was a new respect or at least a curiosity in his limpid, moonful face as he reached me.

  “I was just talking with the ambassador,” he said breathlessly. “She tells me that you actually knew Douglas MacArthur.”

  “I worked for him,” I answered, turning away and looking at the approaching rain.

  “What was he like?”

  “I just felt a drop of rain,” I said, avoiding his question, for it is one that I have seldom seen fit to answer.

  My silence proceeds from a small but insistent conceit. Many people have claimed that they knew Douglas MacArthur. I knew him better than any of them and so I must say that all of them were wrong. Because I knew him not at all.

  The General, as he demanded to be called, had no friends. Born like a crown prince to an earlier and equally mighty general, he was from his first breath a creature of the army’s rigid structure. People came in categories. There were superiors, who must be wheedled, impressed, and at the proper moment defied. Next came peers, to be intimidated, secretly probed, and then defeated in pursuit of rank and honors. Below them were subordinates, who owed the Great Man flawless performance, unquestioning loyalty, and frequent adulation.

  Then out beyond the khaki-sentried gates, on the other side of the bugles and the camp fires, lived the grey, foreign “other world,” a place never, even in his dotage, to be actually lived in but always to be tolerated. For who but they could paint his glory upon the canvas of the nation’s history? These Other Worlders were in his mind a mixed and unhappy bunch, all in need either of his blanket or his sword—unknowing and undisciplined civilians, scheming, malleable politicians, oppressed peoples with their rice bowls and empty hands stretched hopelessly into the air. And the blood enemies—the most honorable of them marching toward him through fields of muck with their weapons at the ready, the truly contemptible among them armed only with cameras that needed to be tricked or notepads to be lied into.

  And finally, always in his waking thoughts like the summer sun’s warmest aurora, was his mother, Pinky. Pinky was the only person who had ever truly known MacArthur. Indeed she was the very force that created him, not merely in the flesh but in the always unsettled, reaching maw of his yearning and domineering spirit. She had lost her two other sons, one to disease and the other to war, and through most of the General’s life seemed to compensate by compelling him to be large enough for all three of their youthful dreams.

  And certainly he was more than one mere man, although perhaps not in the manner that Pinky had imagined. He was a brilliant and tormented child, Douglas MacArthur, even at age sixty-two, when I first met him. Even yet when I saw him for the last time more than twenty years later, a few weeks before he died.

  I rode with him, flew with him, sat through his peacock tirades, lived for his praise, and suffered his abuse as if I were some eager young Polonius. Each day was a roller-coaster ride. I ran the gamut of emotions—ever happy to be near his greatness, fortunate to be treated to the wonders of his mind, distressed from time to time at my inability to comprehend the centuries that passed before his eyes even as he studied the mindless mire of a rain-driven rice field, thrilled on the rare occasions he would pat me on the back and tell me how important were my small, throbbing contributions to the advancement of the war and thus the universe.

  Yes, a young Polonius. Not at the hot gates, where the war belched its ugly, temperamental fury, but in the jeep, on the plane, five people down from the Great One, reading his mail, taking his orders, running his secret errands, even on occasion venturing a phrase of carefully considered advice. Deferential, as they say. Devoted, to a fault. Glad to be of use.

  We did have a few things in common. We both were born in Arkansas—he by the mischance of army assignments, in Fort Dodge, near Little Rock, where his father served frontier duty as an infantry officer, mine by the sad inevitability of four generations of misguided meanderings, in a tenant house fifty miles to the north, where my own father sharecropped someone else’s cotton along chopped and sunbaked rows of powdered earth scratched from the snake-filled forest. We both were seduced early in our lives by East Asia, gone green and willing like stupefied young lovers to its clamoring energy, its swelter and odd rhythms, and then never shaking its seduction, forever after finding euphemistic reasons to return. We both made careless choices in our women, coming painful and naive to romance and paying a lifelong price for our hesitations. And of course there was the army, that frail gossamer which by the accident of necessity bound us together for three dazzling but terrifying years.

  And there was also much to divide us. But that came later.

  Out in the bay the rain approached swiftly, making a wide cat’s paw on the water that crept ever closer. A few drops splashed against my face. I knew I must hurry or be drenched. I began jogging toward the embassy building, my escort in tow. As we reached the building a ragged curtain of rain roared across the yard behind us, pulling a full storm behind it as it moved with fury into old Manila beyond the embassy walls. I found myself laughing as the storm passed within arm’s reach of my haven under the building’s eaves. Its timing was perfect, the ideal final welcoming moment of my return.

  “I’ll leave now,” I said. “Thank the ambassador for her courtesies, will you?”

  He had a new mission, though, as if he deserved some payment in kind for having interrupted his Sunday siesta to accompany me.

  “They say he was a genius?”

  I watched his expectant face, knowing he would not understand, and sighed out a small reward. “He was brilliant when he spoke of war and history, but he could be stupid with people who manipulated his ego. He was kind, but in the end I found him cruel. He helped me more than any other person. But in truth, he did it for himself.”

  The young man looked at me as if I had uttered the Riddle of the Sphinx. I ignored his further curiosity, heading into the building and cutting along the corridors until we reached the front portico, where my car still waited.

  I reconsidered as we walked, and at the car I surprised him. I shook his hand and then held it firmly, watching his eyes grow ever rounder as I spoke.

  “He killed a man. I could say murdered, but what would be the use? He killed a great man because of his jealousy and his ego.”

  “Who?” he said, delicately trying to loosen my grip on his hand.

  “MacArthur.”

  “No, sir. I mean, who did he kill?”

  “Why, General Tomoyuki Yamashita,” I answered. “He killed him, with the full blessing and encouragement of the Japanese imperial government. They wanted one thing, he wanted another. And Yamashita became the sacrificial lamb that served them both. I watched it. I was a part of it.”

  He was looking at me as if I were a different person, not an eminent retired ambassador who had made a fortune on Wall Street but an old man who had brought a bad rain, given over to a vengeful paranoia.

  “But—I’ve read about this, sir. A military court convicted Yamashita. And t
he Japanese wouldn’t have wanted him dead—he was one of their greatest war heroes. And anyway, the imperial government was dissolved by the time MacArthur took over the occupation.”

  “A court? It was not a court. And the imperial government? It never truly dissolved. So, you see, you know nothing,” I finally let go of his hand. “And Yamashita? The imperial court hated him! They had other people to protect, you know.”

  He chuckled to himself, turning his head for a moment to hide a smile, and I knew that in his eyes I now had become an old fool. Diplomatically changing the subject, he pointed to the deep scar that to this day jags across my right cheek like an ugly bolt of lightning.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m rude, sir. But did you get that in the war?”

  Now, that was indeed rudeness. I opened up the car door. “I got it here in the Philippines.” I climbed into the car. “Good day, young man. I really do have to go!”

  I left him puzzled and speechless in the driveway, waving slightly as we pulled out into the still-ravenous rainstorm. As usual I had said as little as possible, and as always it was misunderstood. Not that it mattered. It all would have taken too much energy to explain, and it would not have been in his bureaucratic training to comprehend.

  I urged the driver onward. The rain would soon stop, but the traffic had already been brought to a waterlogged standstill. I had an appointment in Quezon City that had taken me more than thirty years to arrange. And I had no desire, ever again in my life, to try and explain to resistant ears what led up to those final hours that left Tomoyuki Yamashita dangling from a rope at Los Banos.

  PART ONE

  OCTOBER 1944–AUGUST 1945

  CHAPTER 1

  For two days we zigzagged north and west up from Hollandia, making a snaking column one hundred miles long. The sea was heavy with us, frothing in our wakes. Two fleets of warships plowed the waters—aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, oilers, cargo ships, personnel carriers, minesweepers, landing craft—seven hundred of them belching their smoke and churning their screws, heading unknowingly into perhaps the greatest naval battle of all time. Two hundred thousand soldiers waited puking and nervous in the holds and on the decks of the transport ships, ready to be offloaded and thrown against enemy positions in yet another steaming jungle. At night they cleaned their weapons, said their prayers, and wrote letters home. We were heading for Leyte.

  I had embarked as the junior member of General MacArthur’s staff on the cruiser USS Nashville. Our journey filled me with an almost superstitious dread. I did not like warships and in fact had enlisted in the army to be away from them. They too often sank, and when they did they brought their sailors with them, making cold, steel, barnacled coffins deep in the yeasty surges of the still-volcanic, ever-erupting Pacific. For those of us who had not aspired to military careers, such unhappy conclusions had been the subject of much conversation in the uncertain days that followed Pearl Harbor. Viewing our choices, the war boiled down to different ways of dying. Would it be worse to sink and drown, or to fall like a shot quail from the air, or merely to crumple into the sweet grass from a bullet or artillery round?

  In January 1942 I had weighed these options and finally acquiesced to facing death in the dirt. Luckily for me, the army took note of my ability to speak passing Japanese. Starved for such talent, they had sent me to language school instead of infantry training. I was then shipped immediately to the Pacific, where I spent five months as an interrogator-translator and then was ordered to MacArthur’s staff. I was a good staff officer, something of a natural diplomat, enthusiastically obedient and always thorough. A recent top college athlete, I carried myself with a rugged self-confidence that seemed to accentuate my obeisance. MacArthur and his top generals had grown to like and trust me completely.

  But behind my smiling facade was a profound sense of unworthiness. Every morning as I reported to the General’s headquarters for my day’s orders, I reminded myself that if it had not been for this stroke of luck by which I had learned to speak Japanese, my war would have been more predictable and far more dangerous. Indeed, my younger brother had taken the more traditional family route, his eight years of school and dumbifying Arkansas dialect ensuring him a role as an infantry private. As with my father and his father before him, he had turned into a brave and competent soldier. And he had died in June 1944, in a little town I had never heard of, during the invasion of France.

  No, I was not born to this. I had never even seen a city until the age of fourteen, when one bleak rainwinter morning my mother awakened and announced to us that my dead father had come to her in a dream and told her that we should leave Arkansas and go to California. The corn shucks in my makeshift mattress rustled under me as I rubbed my eyes awake, watching her busily pack four cotton bags. It was obvious, watching her lined and furious face, that Daddy had meant for us to leave that very day.

  My father’s grave lay in a small cemetery just above a thickly wooded cow pasture, marked only by a favorite rock. We visited it together before we departed. Mother said a prayer for all of us and then promised Daddy that she wouldn’t leave him buried in this lonesome field, that she would move him to California once things got better. He had been dead less than a year and I could still feel his presence, warm as a woolen sweater and filled with a knowing kindness that had irreplaceably disappeared from my life when they lowered his pine coffin into the hole.

  As I stood over his grave for perhaps the last time, my father seemed alive again. Two hundred yards in front of me a thin herd of cattle grazed on winter grass. Off in the distance a squirrel gun went off, bagging someone’s lucky supper. I tried to listen to his voice. I thought I heard him tell me that he had made a big mistake by staying in this cruel backwater place, that if he had only left instead of fighting its ugly reality, he would never have been laid into an early grave. I looked at the plain jagged rock of a tombstone that would not long remember him and I decided that he had told Mother the same thing in her dream the night before.

  I had never seen even a picture that was as beautiful as the California coast. The morning after our bus arrived in Santa Monica I stood on the vast pier and smelled the salt air and the seafood cooking and watched the lazy pace of people walking and fishing, and I looked back toward the bluffs at the waves breaking over the sand and then the rows of lofty palm trees that disappeared northward toward Malibu and I will admit I cried. It had been beyond my capacity even to imagine such beauty and contentment. I was ragged and longhaired and laughed at but I felt my father’s warmth surround me, and I vowed that I would never let my mother leave.

  There were schools. I was smart. And just as important, at least for me, I discovered that I had a knack for carrying this nearly weightless leather object called a football and knocking people over when they tried to bring me to the ground. Mother objected fiercely, arguing that I should be working, but I found it to be great fun. Three years later she was stunned beyond amazement to find that top universities throughout the state were vying for the right to pay my way through college, asking only that I continue to show up in the afternoons after classes and play for a while with the other boys and on the weekends do the same before large crowds.

  I chose the University of Southern California because it was near Mother and I could still help her on the weekends. She found work in a defense plant, and after mobilization worked twelve-hour shifts as a riveter, her small size ideal for climbing into the narrow nose sections of military aircraft. My brother was studying to become an electrician, knowing he would soon be called into the army.

  Life was good in California, and the coming war only helped us.

  Just off the campus, on a side street near Exposition Park, a Japanese family ran a grocery store, specializing in fresh fruits and vegetables brought in from the valley by other Asian immigrants. I was nineteen, in my second year at Southern Cal, when I first saw Kozuko. She was standing in front of her father’s store, arranging a sidewalk display of fruits an
d vegetables. She was wearing a full white apron, tied tight around her tiny waist. A red bandanna pulled her hair away from her face and clutched it long and flowing down the center of her back. Her face was downturned, frowning from some inner debate. She went about her work with such a proud and careful delicacy that she might have been placing lush, exotic flowers into a grand vase. But when she looked up and saw me, she smiled.

  I was enormously shy, still conscious of my full-voweled Arkansas accent and my unvarnished social etiquette. Southern Cal had actually increased this shyness, despite my quick notoriety on the football field. It was a high-tuition, sophisticated school, and I was not yet sufficiently facile to turn my ragged journey into a party joke. I finally smiled back. I had no reason to talk to her other than my awkward appreciation of her beauty, but I finally mumbled that I wanted to learn to speak Japanese. She told me she wanted to speak better English. We agreed to teach each other. And within two weeks, over the objections of both our parents, we were inseparable.

  We fell together naturally, more as playmates than lovers, both outsiders, immigrants from different kinds of remoteness. And as I struggled to please her, Kozuko opened up for me a fascination with Asia and its many cultures. On the weekends in Santa Monica she and I would look out into the vast, emptying darkness of the Pacific, practicing Japanese and talking of the intricate culture that defined her parents’ homeland. I began reading constantly, at times deep into Asian history and at others following the trail of Japan’s ongoing military conquests.

  And then Pearl Harbor was attacked. Kozuko and her family were sent to camps in Texas. I reported to the army. Japan became the hated enemy. Indeed, its army and its rulers were vicious, unyielding, cruel to those they conquered. But I never lost my fascination for its ancient greatness, and I could never hate the Japanese as a people after I had known the sweetness of Kozuko and seen the strength of her family.