The Emperor's General

by James Webb

  Standing before him, I found myself wishing that he would rise from his chair, yelling and screaming, even if he were finally going to obey the edict that I had dropped into his hands.

  Instead, he nodded calmly one more time and put the letter carefully into a folder that lay on top of his desk.

  “We’re ready,” said General Reynolds. “We went through a dry run this morning. The facilities are superb. The press has been fully briefed. The witnesses have all been prepared. We’re starting on time. You should assure General MacArthur that we’re fully sensitive to his needs.”

  Spoken like a true logistician, I thought, watching his impassive face. The supply train is loaded and on the way to its destination. He might have been moving a carload of K rations to the front instead of a Japanese general toward the gallows. “Yes, sir. I’ll tell him.”

  He eyed me almost supinely as we walked together toward his office door, speaking with unabashed deference despite my rank. “You’ve been with General MacArthur since early in the war?”

  “Three years now, sir.”

  “What an honor that must have been.”

  “He’s a great man, sir.”

  “A great American. Please pass on my best wishes to him when you return to Tokyo.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll do that.”

  At the door the general hesitated, as if he might have breached some unspoken protocol. “Do you have dinner plans, Captain?”

  “Actually, sir, I do.”

  It was an unspoken comment on the general’s lack of power, even over one of MacArthur’s low-ranking minions, that I had no qualms in declining to dine with him and that he took my rejection graciously.

  I found Frank Witherspoon inside a Quonset hut that had been made into a gym, banging away on a sand-filled punching bag. The punching bag was hung by a chain from the hut’s low ceiling. It had been made from an old canvas lister bag, used during the war for storing and treating water. Yamashita’s defense lawyer was barechested, wearing crimson Harvard gym shorts, green jungle socks, and ugly black military tennis shoes. I could tell he was not a fighter. He had no chest muscles. His chin was high in the air when he swung, inviting a quick knockout, and he carried his hands too low. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his feet as he circled the bag. When he hit the bag he curled his wrists, beating it along the sides rather than throwing the straight, clean punches of an experienced boxer. But his face steamed with fury every time he threw a blow. I had been on my way to the officers’ mess for dinner and had seen Witherspoon through the open doorway of the gym. I stopped and watched him for a while, leaning against the door and trying not to laugh. Finally he noticed me. He grunted as he threw a few more spasmodic punches, then turned to face me.

  “I’m pretending this is your boss,” he said.

  “Well, he’s winning.”

  “Fuck you.” Witherspoon stifled his embarrassment, breathing hard from his workout. Father Garvey would have truly enjoyed attempting to save him. He had absolutely no humility. “I fight a lot better with my brain, Marsh.”

  “Damn, I hope so. Otherwise you’ll starve.”

  “All right, wise guy.” He pulled off the bag gloves and tossed them to me. “You talk a good game. Go ahead.”

  I checked the chain above the punching bag as I slowly put on the gloves. “You don’t want me to do this.”

  “Oh, ho. Superman speaks.”

  I shrugged, grinning at him, then stepped into the bag with a double jab that set it swinging, followed by a right cross that tore the chain from the ceiling. The bag ended up ten feet away, where two lieutenants were lifting weights. They howled with surprise.

  “Whoa,” said Witherspoon, actually appearing impressed. “Remind me not to piss you off.”

  “It’s too late for that,” I said.

  “You’ve done this a few times before?”

  “Where I come from, Witherspoon, it’s a part of growing up.”

  “Not what I’d expect out of a general’s weenie.”

  “I wasn’t always a general’s weenie, you know.” I took off the bag gloves. “Want me to show you how?”

  “How can you? You broke the bag! Anyway, I’m not exactly looking at this as a career.” He had pulled on a green T-shirt and was now taking a few deep breaths as if recovering from a heavy workout. “I was almost done.” He began walking, and nodded toward the doorway, an invitation to come with him. “What are you doing back here?”

  “I thought I’d buy you dinner.”

  “Let’s go next door,” he said, grinning ironically. “It’s Spam night at the local bar and grill.”

  Inside the officers’ mess, the wispy-thin captain preceded me through the chow line and then found a table. He grunted knowingly as I carried my metal tray of food toward him. The trial preparations had worn Witherspoon down. His face carried a fatigue that made him look ten years older than when I had first met him a few weeks before. His mouth was full of mess-hall Spam as I took my seat. Finally, he swallowed.

  “Actually, I heard you were back in town. So you met with General Reynolds, huh?”

  “A well-intentioned officer,” I said, starting to cut my food. “He even looks like a judge.”

  “Looks are deceiving,” said Witherspoon. “How can a guy who’s never even had one day of law school preside over a capital murder case? What does he even know about the rules of evidence? And he’s not alone. Not one member of this commission is a lawyer!”

  “I seem to recall you whining about that the last time I saw you,” I said.

  “Oh, so now it’s irrelevant because it’s old news?” Witherspoon piddled with his food. “Did I talk to you about military expertise? This case centers on the unique chaos that attends ground combat. Not one of these guys was in combat, either! Reynolds wasn’t even in Asia during the war. He ran the Sixth Service Command in Chicago, making sure that logistics ran smoothly in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan.” Witherspoon laughed dryly. “I don’t recall very many air attacks or ambushes on the supply lines in the campaign for the Great American Midwest.”

  I nodded quietly, sharing his cynicism. Sam Genius’s recent departure had only deepened this feeling. “The supreme commander hardly sees those as problems.”

  “Of course not,” said Witherspoon, his eyes afire with renewed anger. “He’s got the perfect commission. Three major generals and two brigadiers whose future promotions and assignments depend on MacArthur! None of them with the legal background to understand the technical and procedural objections we might raise to protect Yamashita from false or unfair testimony. None of them with the combat experience that would give them credibility if they actually wanted to sympathize with the total confusion Yamashita had to operate under. So no matter what the evidence might say, none of them will dare to take Yamashita’s side!”

  I could not have argued with Witherspoon’s logic even if I had wanted to. A hundred thousand Filipino civilians had been slaughtered during the retaking of Manila. There were plenty of witnesses to the rapes and the cruelties of the beleaguered, suicidal Japanese defenders. Back home, America had just begun basking in the glorious relief of a brutal war’s final victory. MacArthur, for whom parks were being named and statues erected, had personally fingered Yamashita as the Asian war’s most egregious perpetrator of mass slaughter. Who among these five marginally qualified general officers would dare to go against not only the supreme commander but the angry memories of their fighting soldiers and the righteous justification of the public back home? And where on this planet would such a person decide to work and to live if he did so?

  “It’s an odd feeling,” I said. “But it’s almost like General Yamashita has become irrelevant to his own case.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Witherspoon.

  “I don’t know what I mean,” I answered, toying with my food. “It’s just a feeling that I have.”

  “Well, let me personalize that feeling for you,” said Witherspoon. “General Reynolds sent
us a supplemental bill yesterday. Yesterday, two days before the trial! We thought maybe we’d get two or three new charges. No, he sent us fifty-nine. Fifty-nine fucking charges, and now the trial starts tomorrow! We went from sixty-four to a hundred and twenty-three, and every new charge involves new places, new people, new witnesses!”

  Witherspoon was a very emotional guy, which no doubt is what had made him such a successful trial lawyer before the war. Both his hands were now in front of his face, waving at me as he spoke. “I filed for a continuance, using the exact language General MacArthur put into his directive creating the commission, stating that the accused is entitled to have the charges in advance of trial. I asked Reynolds if two days is what MacArthur intended when he wrote that. And, hey, if two days is OK for fifty-nine new charges, why not fifteen minutes? That’s in advance of the trial. I reminded him that we’re supposed to be operating under traditional American concepts of law, such as fairness, decency, and justice. And do you know what he told me?”

  “We’re in a hurry,” I said.

  “You’re pretty good,” quipped Witherspoon. “Are you the guy writing all these notes from Tokyo?”

  “I only deliver them,” I answered.

  “General Reynolds told us his policy. Continuances will be given only for what he calls ‘urgent and unavoidable reasons.’ So I asked him, is there any more serious urgency than not having been allowed to prepare for fifty-nine new charges? Is there anything more unavoidable than not being ready because the charges were dropped onto my lap two days before trial? And do you know what he said?”

  “Time is of the essence,” I conjectured, finishing my Spam.

  “You got it. He told us that we can prepare the case for the last fifty-nine while we argue the first sixty-four.”

  Witherspoon shook his head hopelessly, running pale, slender fingers through his shock of red hair. “Now, let’s see. Beginning tomorrow, we’re going into all-day sessions, six days a week, many of them already scheduled to be extended into night sessions as well. That means we’ll have Sundays and our ‘free’ evenings to research the additional charges, interview witnesses, maybe travel to the scene of the alleged crime and prepare a defense for a man they’re trying to hang. All of this at the same time we’ll be trying to get ready for court the next morning on the sixty-four charges that are on the table.”

  He laughed dryly, almost a bark. “Did I say ‘court?’ Excuse me. I exaggerate. Indeed, I insult my profession. And as I am constantly reminded, with the legal calling’s abysmal reputation that is very difficult to do. Anyway, all this is going to be—how shall I say it delicately—about as easy as a skunk smelling a fart in a hurricane. We’ve got three lawyers here—the fourth guy assigned to the defense team is in the hospital and won’t be out for months. We’ve got one other lawyer who’s already started researching how to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. Because let’s face it, the verdict is already in.”

  “Did you say ‘verdict’?”

  “Very good. I think he gets the point.” Witherspoon stopped, as if catching his breath. He kept peering at me with his disarming, all-seeing eyes. “So, Captain, let me ask you a very important question.”

  He had hardly touched his food. My plate was clean. I was sipping on a cup of piping-hot mess hall coffee. I was becoming sad, because what I was hearing was not a lecture on the railroading of General Tomoyuki Yamashita so much as a dirge that lamented the passing of my own childlike innocence. Witherspoon’s bitter words, mixed in with the coffee and the smell of the mess hall, left me lonely for the long-ago evenings spent in the Nashville’s wardroom as we steamed from Hollandia toward Leyte. Had that only been one year ago, almost exactly to the day?

  “The gentleman has a question,” I teased. “Ask away.” I sat down the coffee cup, watching him expectantly.

  “Have you ever seen General MacArthur act this weird before?”

  “Now, that’s complicated. Am I under oath?”

  “I’m actually serious,” he said, shaking his head at my apparent frivolity. “What’s going on inside the man’s head?”

  It suddenly embarrassed me that I would dissemble at such a moment. “Sorry,” I said. “You overestimate both my access and my intelligence. The General is a very complicated man.”

  “I’d just like to know,” he said, looking around at the nearly empty dining area. “Either Douglas MacArthur has lost it, or there’s something going on here that I can’t figure out. And I’m not a dumb guy, Marsh. Appreciate that. I’m a student of human nature. I’ve made good money as a trial lawyer by being able to figure out people’s motivations. All the hidden impulses that seduce their greed and assuage their fears and propel their stupid acts. That’s my specialty, OK? And I’ve read a lot about MacArthur. The good things and the criticisms, too. I know he doesn’t like

  Yamashita. I know how much he loved Manila. But come on. The man is truly an American hero. He’s going to go down in history, and he deserves to! And now he’s about to commit formalized murder, against the one guy in the entire Japanese army that he should respect above all the others. Why is he willing to have this on his conscience?”

  “I am not MacArthur’s chaplain, Captain Witherspoon. I don’t know anything about his conscience.”

  “Come on,” he said. “That’s not an answer.”

  I held his gaze, wishing I could tell him of the meetings I had sat through and of my own disconcerted struggles. But I could not ignore the fact that Witherspoon was General Yamashita’s defense counsel. Anything I might try to say to him could very well end up being used in the coming proceedings, possibly with me as a sworn witness for the defense. And above all, one did not speak to outsiders about what was discussed inside the room with the giants.

  “I can’t help you, Captain.”

  “You just did,” answered the intuitive lawyer. He offered me a small smile. “I know you by now, Marsh. You’re a pretty loyal guy. If there was nothing going on, you’d have said so.”

  He dug into his food, watching for me as if waiting for a response. “Not even a reply, huh? Damn, you’re good.”

  “I like my job,” I said.

  He grunted, chewing slowly, dismissing me with his eyes. “I think you like it too much.”

  The trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita was held in the huge, ornate reception hall of the American high commissioner’s residence in downtown Manila.

  In preparing for the worldwide attention that the case would receive, General Reynolds, who knew a good stage prop when he saw one, had used this grand symbol of American continuity and power to its full advantage. Reynolds had placed a long rectangular table at the very front of the enormous room, where seven French doors made an arc looking out across a tropical lawn toward Manila Bay. Between the windows and the table were five leather swivel chairs, in which the commission’s members would sit as they heard the case. The crossed flagstaffs of the United States and the Philippines Commonwealth stood behind the center chair. Reynolds had placed two desks in front of the table where the commission would sit, one for a court reporter and the other for the official interpreters. Further off to the right was the counsel table where Tomoyuki Yamashita would sit, along with his attorney, Frank Witherspoon. Off to the left was a similar table for the prosecuting attorneys.

  This little stage, set against the backdrop of the grand and placid bay, played out to a ballroom where chairs had been set for three hundred spectators and to a series of balconies where dozens of reporters, including moving-picture cameramen and radio announcers, would be provided the best field of vision from which to view and then tell the story of Yamashita’s demise. A special section of two front rows in the ballroom was also reserved for VIPs, top-level reporters, and photographers, who would be permitted to take flash-camera photographs at any time during the proceedings.

  Reynolds had been admirably thorough in carrying out the supreme commander’s desire that the trial be set up to receive maximum worldwide exposure. He had
put microphones at each desk and table, and had even hung large loudspeakers from the ceiling and along the walls. Mindful of the film cameras in the balcony, he had also placed spotlights along the outer edges of the room and six powerful klieg lights in the ceiling, all of them focused on the stage he had erected by the room’s French doors. When the klieg lights went on, the stage area burned with a ferocious glare and the entire auditorium baked like the jungle itself from the added heat.

  It was October 29, 1945. A year ago at this moment we had barely established ourselves in Tacloban, having endured the frightening near miss of Admiral Kurita’s misjudgment in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. MacArthur had fulfilled an exultant promise he had made to me in the landing craft as it puttered back to the Nashville on the first night of his return to the Philippines while the wet rain washed our faces and we watched the torch fires that our artillery had left on the beaches of Leyte. We would be in Tokyo within a year. That’s what he had predicted on that rainful but moonwashed night.

  We had done better than that. We had already gone to Tokyo. We had planted the flag, claimed our victories, and even begun to discover our fallibilities. But now we were going to rewrite a portion of the history of our journey, relocate a few of the markers on the trail we had left behind, replace complexity with simplicity, assign grand blame instead of accepting the futility of a hundred thousand unavenged tragedies. For reasons that transcended this courtroom and Manila and even the conduct of the war itself, we were going to create a villain where before there had only been ugly chaos.

  Nanking, I thought, entering the ballroom for the trial’s opening day and taking a VIP seat in the front row. That is why I’m here. Higashikuni. Asaka. Konoye. Hirohito. Kido. And don’t forget the Meiji Constitution.