The Emperor's General

by James Webb

  In plain words, as history’s most gruesome war was ending, the emperor had denied that Japan had erred and told his people to prepare again for the future. Watching and listening to his lord privy seal as we drove toward Yokohama, those words took on a fresh meaning. The Japanese people may have been in shock, but their leaders, with their fierce loyalties and incredible minds, were not stumbling blindly into these new days of peace. MacArthur and Willoughby had their plan, which was to harness the emperor in order to rule Japan through his offices. But there could be no doubt that Kido and the emperor had their strategy as well. In his radio message the emperor had embarked on a sacred mission: to deliver Japan and the imperial system intact to future generations. Were they planning to do so by harnessing MacArthur? If so, this appeal to his vanity was a proper beginning.

  We had reached Yokohama’s waterfront park area. Soon the comical little convoy halted before the old, Edwardian New Grand Hotel. A tuxedoed, elderly man whom Kido pointed out to me as Yozo Namura, the hotel’s longtime owner, greeted MacArthur with a deep bow as the supreme commander stepped out of the ancient Lincoln. I began to hurry out of the car, knowing that MacArthur and his generals would need me to help arrange their accommodations. But the lord privy seal tugged insistently at my arm.

  “Captain Jay Marsh!” said Kido, his eyebrows raised and his face as always looking shocked and alert. “I am very happy that you speak such good Japanese and that you have such a strong understanding of what needs to be done. We must work together! Please let me know if there is anything the supreme commander would like to pass on to the emperor.”

  I shook Kido’s hand. “I will tell the General. You should call on me anytime, Lord Privy Seal.”

  “We can talk freely, yes? You and I? Without pretense?”

  I searched into his eyes, unsure why he would seek to share any intimacies with a young and lowly officer such as myself. I knew that my position on MacArthur’s staff meant something to him. And perhaps it was essential that Kido return to the emperor with at least one American who could be dealt with directly.

  I shrugged in agreement, mildly flattered by his invitation. Behind me, General Whitney was calling my name, demanding that I help the senior officers check into the hotel. Kido noticed this and smiled with obvious pleasure. That a senior general was calling urgently to me seemed to be elevating my status even more.

  “If you want to talk freely to me, Lord Privy Seal, I will talk freely with you.”

  “Without pretense?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Openly.”

  “Excellent!” His bright, active eyes were now everywhere at once, as if recording all the events and assimilating them for his report to the emperor. “So. Now I will go. And I will talk to you very soon!”

  The charcoal-fired car stumbled off into the almost-empty street. From the backseat, Kido waved at me as if we were now old friends. And then I hurried into the hotel.

  The lobby was a madhouse as senior generals and their aides began to fight for the best rooms. In the midst of all this chaos, MacArthur stood next to General Court Whitney, talking quietly. Nearby, Mr. Namura and four bowing maids were waiting to show him to the hotel’s finest suite.

  Always autocratic, MacArthur had taken on a regal air during the motorcade from Atsugi. As I neared them, he was glowing euphorically, his eyes glazed with satisfaction. He tapped General Whitney on the chest.

  “Did you ever have a dream that came true, Court?”

  “What a day,” said Court Whitney. “Never in my wildest imagination did I think I’d see anything like that.”

  I cleared my throat, trying to get MacArthur’s attention. “Sir—” I began. “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Yes, Jay?”

  “Sir, Lord Privy Seal Kido asked me to tell you that the soldiers along the road were the emperor’s gift, and that—”

  He froze me with a glare, as if I had been insubordinate. “Captain Marsh, how many Americans in this hotel can speak Japanese?”

  I swallowed, looking at him with embarrassment. “Yes, sir. I’ll go take care of them. I thought you’d like some feedback from the lord privy seal, sir. He’s a very powerful man.”

  “Not anymore, he’s not.”

  “I spent a good bit of time with him, sir. He talks directly with the emperor every day.”

  The reminder of Kido’s direct connection to the emperor penetrated MacArthur’s ebullience, causing him to glance shrewdly at Court Whitney. “Did he speak openly with you, Jay?”

  “Yes, sir. He was impressed that I knew Japanese. He wants to—continue a dialogue, I guess. He said that if you wanted to pass anything on to the emperor, I should contact him.”

  “We’ll have our own ways of doing that,” shrugged MacArthur. “But stay in touch with him. We’ll need every piece of intelligence we can get our hands on.”

  “Just keep us posted,” reminded Court Whitney. “There will be only one policy coming out of this command.”

  “Sir,” I hurriedly agreed, feeling young, clumsy, and outclassed. “I know when I’m in over my head. I’m not a policy-level officer.”

  MacArthur fixed me with a piercing stare. “Well said, Captain Marsh. I know this is an exciting time for you, but I have two senior generals advising me on policy, and I will remind you that I have more than forty years’ experience in the Orient myself. We don’t want to offend the emperor, but we don’t want young captains thinking they know how to operate in Japan, either.” He now glanced around at the discord that had invaded the lobby, then smiled benignly to me as if I were an overeager child. “In the meantime, help these people check in, will you?”

  “Yes, sir. Right away, sir.”

  I walked quickly toward the front desk, making myself available to the long line of loud and eager officers, fierce conquerors all, as they fought for rooms equal to their real and imagined statures. MacArthur had every right to dismiss my advice. It did not faze me. I was no one, really. I knew and accepted that. But at that moment I somehow knew that General Douglas MacArthur had changed, even from the brilliant and undeniably egotistical leader I had served on the journey from New Guinea to Manila.

  It was as if the final defeat of Japan had been his own liberation. He had at last climbed the high wall that marked the edges of mortal behavior and was alone and free on the other side. He was the supreme commander, off in the virgin wilderness, beyond where anyone else had ever traveled, running toward his own eternity. An eternity that he himself would define and bring to fruition. Who would dare to make the rules for such a probing pioneer? No one, from me all the way up to President Truman, was going to tell him who to listen to or how to run Japan.

  I did not like this feeling. I did not want to see him this way, or to know him so well. I began to long for the simplicity of Manila, where the world on the far side of the war was something to be dreamed about rather than lived in.

  CHAPTER 7

  For two days the front desk of the New Grand Hotel became my full-time post as I helped the hotel manager sort out American and Allied military ranks and create priorities regarding who would get the better rooms. There were plenty of squabbles. All day, all night, and into the next day the dignitaries flooded in, preparing for the surrender ceremony that would take place aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2. And on the evening of August 31 I presented MacArthur with a ghost that would not die, no matter how hard he tried to dress it up with praise, or disassociate himself by pushing it back into the cobwebbed closet.

  Wainwright.

  The three-star general whom MacArthur had left in command when he fled Corregidor made his way into the hotel lobby, hobbling horribly as he leaned on a brown walnut cane. His hair had become snow-white and feathery. He was gaunt-faced and wispy-thin. His eyes protruded from scarred and sunken cheeks, carrying a beaten opaqueness as they searched the unfamiliar openness of the lobby. After the humiliating surrender at Corregidor, Wainwright had spent the remainder of the war at Japanese prisone
r of war camps in the Philippines, Taiwan, and finally Manchuria. He had been freed by Soviet troops only four days before. Our pilots had flown him briefly to Manila, where he had received a medical checkup and a haircut. A khaki uniform had been specially tailored to fit his emaciated frame. He and General Arthur Percival, the British commander who had surrendered to Yamashita at Singapore, would be special guests aboard the Missouri.

  I did not recognize the ill-fated general as he walked slowly to the front desk, a half-dozen photographers following in his wake. At first I thought he was an old World War One commander, perhaps brought in to receive some special honor for past glories. I left my post near the desk and met him at the center of the lobby.

  “Good evening, General,” I said, noting the three stars on his collar. “Are you checking in, sir?”

  His voice was throaty, a near-whisper. “I’m looking for General MacArthur.”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered. “And who shall I say wishes to see the supreme commander?”

  “Wainwright,” he said, searching my face as if silently asking whether I recognized his name. “Jonathan M. Wainwright.”

  “General Wainwright?” My stare betrayed my utter shock. It seemed incomprehensible that this aged, wasting man now leaning against his cane had graduated from West Point four years after MacArthur and served under him as a subordinate commander.

  “Do I know you, son?” He was squinting terribly, trying to place my face. “Were you with us at Bataan?”

  “No, sir. But I’m very proud to meet you, General.”

  “Where is General MacArthur?”

  I raised both of my hands, as if to still him. “Don’t go away, sir. I’ll be right back.”

  MacArthur was in the hotel dining room, starting his second dinner of the evening. I approached his table quietly, uncertain not only about intruding but of the reaction I would receive. For it was well known that despite MacArthur’s passion for erasing the stain of Bataan, he had not been kind to the abandoned Wainwright after his own escape to Australia. In truth, it had been Wainwright all along, rather than MacArthur, who had led the actual defense of Bataan. During the entire siege, MacArthur had left the relative safety of the dark, cool tunnels of Corregidor to visit his soldiers on the Bataan Peninsula only once. It was Wainwright who had directed the artillery, and walked the lines, and suffered the mosquitoes and pellagra and dysentery, and looked into the hopeless faces of dying American and Filipino soldiers as they withstood an unremitting Japanese advance. And it was Wainwright who in the end had been left behind to face the grim reality of defeat.

  Then from the safety of Australia as the Japanese sledgehammer pounded the trapped and abandoned Bataan defenders and their rations dwindled toward an inevitable starvation, it had been MacArthur who had humiliated Wainwright by radioing Washington, “it is of course possible that with my departure the vigor of application of conservation may have been relaxed.” And as the Japanese swarmed through the Bataan Peninsula and began the direct invasion of Corregidor, which was now cut off from all resupplies, it had been MacArthur who had fantastically urged that Wainwright “prepare and execute an attack upon the enemy,” arguing that he was “utterly opposed under any circumstances to the ultimate capitulation of this command.”

  And as the Japanese began dropping sixteen thousand artillery rounds a day on the overwhelmed Corregidor defenses, and then assaulted, forcing their surrender, it had been MacArthur who had radioed Washington that “Wainwright has temporarily become unbalanced, and susceptible of enemy use.” And MacArthur, whose Medal of Honor after his flight from Corregidor was proposed by General George Catlett Marshall as a propaganda measure to erase the stain of his having fled, had for years been the main obstacle to Wainwright’s receiving the same award for having remained and fought. Wainwright’s actions, according to MacArthur, did not warrant this great distinction, and his having surrendered would have brought injustice to the hallowed medal.

  I approached the supreme commander quietly, watching him slice into a steak. “Sir,” I said, “you have a visitor outside.” He looked up from his plate, chewing his meat, quietly rebuking me for having interrupted his dining. “General Wainwright, sir.”

  A kaleidoscope of emotions swirled inside MacArthur’s eyes as he finished chewing. Swallowing, he peered toward the dining room’s entrance and then took a slow drink from his water glass. Finally he rose quickly from his chair and began to stride in the direction of the lobby.

  Wainwright had been walking slowly toward us from the lobby, and the two generals met just inside the dining room. Without hesitation MacArthur embraced his former subordinate, smiling dotingly into his wounded eyes, summoning up all his charm as the cameras flashed in their faces. Wainwright was trying mightily to smile, but the weight of more than three years of uncertainty was too much.

  “The last time I saw you,” said MacArthur lightly, “I was giving you a box of my best cigars and two cans of shaving cream.”

  “You said you’d return,” said Wainwright. “And you damn well did.” He paused, shaking his head. “General,” he said, “I’m—I’m sorry. We did the best we could.”

  “Why, Jim,” said MacArthur, using Wainwright’s old nickname, “I know that. I always knew that.”

  Wainwright began choking up. His mind was still in the mud and drek of 1942, having had to relive the degradation of his surrender a million times as he wallowed in taunt-filled shame from one Japanese prison cell to another. He could not discern that MacArthur’s was now in 1946 or maybe 1964, far on the other side of war. He tried again.

  “I don’t suppose they’ll ever let me have another command.”

  “Jim,” said MacArthur, “mark my words. Your old corps is yours whenever you want it.”

  “General—” said Wainwright. And then he could say no more, for he began weeping uncontrollably.

  Watching Wainwright cry as MacArthur stood with an almost fatherly arm around his bony shoulder, I found myself awash with a sense of injustice that I could not define. Or perhaps it was merely that I was young. I had never before seen with such clarity that great triumphs and disasters can be spawned unexplainably by the same moment, that courage could destroy one man while flight could make another man king. I did not wish to be unfair to MacArthur, but Wainwright had carried the load, fought the impossible fight, suffered the insufferable, borne the unbearable. And here he was, begging for forgiveness from the very man who had left him and the others behind to suffer death, starvation, and captivity.

  It could have been the other way around. These were not dissimilar men. Wainwright, less intellectual but a better soldier, shared MacArthur’s pedigree. His grandfather, a Union naval officer, had been killed in action at the battle for Galveston Harbor in 1863 during the Civil War. His uncle had been killed fighting Mexican pirates in 1870. His father, a West Point graduate, had fought in the Indian Wars and in the Spanish-American War, and then died on active duty in Manila in 1902, just as Wainwright was entering West Point. Like MacArthur, Wainwright had been chosen First Captain at West Point, had seen action in the Philippines immediately after graduating, and had been in heavy combat during World War One. Among Wainwright’s high decorations for heroism was a Distinguished Service Cross for maneuvering his forces from northern Luzon onto the Bataan Peninsula in a hard-fought retrograde just after the Japanese landed at Lingayen Gulf in 1942.

  Unlike MacArthur, Wainwright was utterly guileless. And unlike MacArthur he was loyal to a fault. Wainwright at that very moment could have been arguing that had MacArthur listened to him in 1942 and moved sooner onto the Bataan Peninsula, they could have brought along tons of food and ammunition, and there would never have been an admonition from MacArthur in Australia, much less a surrender or a death march. But Wainwright was a true soldier. He would never in the rest of his life speak a word against his old commander.

  In MacArthur’s smiling face I saw relief, because with his instinctive cunning he had quickly realized that W
ainwright would never do so. But I also saw something else. As his gaze lingered on Wainwright’s frail features and white hair, then met the eyes that seemed at that moment only half back from the near dead, MacArthur was staring into an uncomfortable mirror. There but for an escape stood he himself, had he been strong enough at his age to survive what Wainwright had endured. Wainwright was the living reminder not only of the ignominy of his earlier failure but of the fate that had befallen the very luckiest of those who had been left behind.

  Where would MacArthur have been at this moment, and what would he have looked like, if he, like Skinny Wainwright and even Tomoyuki Yamashita, had stayed behind with his men? This was not an idle or unfair question. Even Eisenhower had proposed to General Marshall in 1942 that MacArthur stay and fight. But instead of standing white-haired and broken before the world in crimped khakis, begging for some fresh understanding of an ever more distant plight, MacArthur was the new Caesar. During the siege of Corregidor MacArthur’s dreams were so narrow that he had shamelessly inveigled a promise from Philippines president Quezon to rehire him as grand marshal once the war ended, with the same salary and benefits as before. Now he was preparing to take the Japanese surrender and to run the entire government of an ancient and mighty nation.