Supreme Commander

by Seymour Morris, Jr.

  Yet how much war had now changed! Had he not told George Kenney, his commander of the Far East Air Forces: “The winner of the next war is going to be some 2nd lieutenant who pulls the string on the A-bomb”? If technology was this powerful, what did the world need generals for? Were not men like him an endangered species, potential dinosaurs?

  On his silver C-54, an hour had gone by. MacArthur got up and paced the aisle, due to land in two hours at Japan’s Atsugi airfield, the training base for kamikaze pilots. He was confident there would be no trouble, because the emperor had so decreed. He also had confidence in his head general now on the ground making sure everything was okay: Robert Eichelberger, the man to whom he had entrusted the most important part of his Philippine campaign; “Take Buna, or not come back alive.”

  Bob Eichelberger had come back alive, mission accomplished. He was MacArthur’s kind of general, a man who went up to the front and personally inspected the situation instead of relying on subordinates and written reports. When promoted to brigadier general on the same day as his West Point classmate George Patton, Eichelberger received a wire from Patton saying they were “the two best damn officers in the U.S. Army”—an assessment with which MacArthur wholly agreed.

  MacArthur and Eichelberger had something specific in common: Both had held the rarefied position of superintendent of West Point—one of the three positions in the army FDR stipulated that only he could fill (the other two being chief of staff and chief of engineers). Like MacArthur, Eichelberger had instituted major reforms to modernize the academy and toughen the training. Gone were the polite newspaper photographs of cadets jumping horses over hurdles or smiling at pretty girls at a dance—instead, there were “pictures of cadets making river crossings under smoke barrages.” Perhaps most important of all, the two men were passionate football fans and believed the sport to be an essential part of the West Point experience. For MacArthur, who never made the varsity team and had to settle for the position of manager, the highlight of the year was the Army-Navy game, when he would put on headphones, listen to the broadcast over long-range radio, and yell, “Go, Army, go!” So passionate was MacArthur that he had cabled the coach after Army won the 1944 game 24–7: “We have stopped the war to celebrate your magnificent success.” The reason Army was now a football powerhouse was Eichelberger, who—after two disastrous seasons and a 48–0 drubbing in one game—decreed that the Army cadets “deserved a team that would teach them to be good warriors.” Eichelberger recruited the legendary Earl “Red” Blaik, a West Point graduate then coaching at Dartmouth. More important, he single-handedly eliminated the rule stating no cadet could weigh more than 175 pounds. The regulation had been instituted by the U.S. surgeon general on the theory that life expectancy is greater for a slender man. While this may have been true from an actuarial viewpoint, it was one hell of a way to run a football team. Eichelberger won the argument by going down to Washington and pointing out that life expectancy in battle is just about the same for big or little men.

  MacArthur hated bureaucratic thinking. Rules had their place, but adding more and more rules for the sake of convenience was a cowardly and lazy way to run an organization. His experience had taught him several precepts:

  1. There is no substitute for adequate preparation. “Had there been a trained and well equipped army of some 20,000 men at Bull Run, the Civil War never would have been fought,” he had told a 1933 congressional committee. A keen student of history, he was absolutely right: Had the Union won its first major battle, the Civil War would have been over in a day. “To build an army to be defeated by some other fellow’s army is my idea of wasting a great deal of money,” he had told the committee, “and if you are defeated you will pay a billion dollars for every million you save in inadequate preparation.” MacArthur had won the post of Supreme Commander of the Pacific over Admiral Nimitz because he had been better prepared and made a better presentation to President Roosevelt, and he had won his campaign by studying every map thoroughly and figuring out how to surprise the enemy.

  2. In battle the greatest enemy is personal fear, those awful moments when stomach butterflies nervously flap their wings. The most important job of a leader in life-and-death situations is to communicate with his men and provide reassurance. In civilian jobs, obviously, such reassurance is not so germane, but in Japan, amid some seventy-eight million hostile people, it would be essential. He must use all means available to communicate, pronounce, and strengthen his command. He would do this by conducting his office in a forceful manner and using his powerful mastery of rhetoric.

  3. Speed and decisiveness are more important than mass. MacArthur’s stunning conquest of the Philippines was due primarily to his speed and use of highly mobile forces to proceed from one island to the next. MacArthur always had to keep moving forward before bad weather set in or the enemy counterattacked with reinforcements. In civilian contexts the need for such urgency is rare, and managers generally value prudence over recklessness. In Japan he would be in a race against time before the inevitable resentment against military occupation set in. He would have only two years at best. His organization, a peacetime one, would have to run at a wartime pace.

  4. Put as little as possible in writing, especially rules and regulations. In war, for reasons of security, where possible he always issued his directives in person. The same for peacetime: He would eschew bureaucracy and especially its love of cover-your-butt written reports. One of his dicta as superintendent of West Point had read: “To take up a painful matter by letter or other written communication is not only the rankest cowardice but the ruination of morale.” The organization he would create would be a lean one managed by decision makers all the way down the line. In his view, “Too many executives indolently dispense with a problem by sending out a form letter or looking up a precedent in a book, an action any child could do.” His organization, SCAP, would be entirely different. It would be big, of course, but it would act like a lean one: He would make all the key decisions.

  5. Military occupations never last long because nobody likes living under another country’s thumb. For the occupation of Japan to work, extraordinary efforts must be made to understand Japanese psychology and work with it to mutual advantage.

  MacArthur was extremely proud of the job his cadre of officers was doing. Just ten days earlier they caught a horrendous mistake by Washington that could have upset the entire surrender and enabled the Japanese in several years to renounce it as improper and invalid. All because the provincial bureaucrats in Washington didn’t know what everyone who knows a bit of French knows, the difference between vous and tu. One is a formal, impersonal form of “you,” the other is a more personal, intimate one. Many languages make this distinction, which English does not. In Japanese the distinction is as wide as a chasm.

  The surrender documents prepared by Washington had used the wrong pronoun, watakushi, meaning “I”—a word never used by someone so important and dignified as the emperor. The proper word is chin, which translates, for lack of a better term, into “we.” Using the wrong word was more than just incorrect, more than just degrading and humiliating to the emperor: It was a mistake with profound legal implications.

  Fortunately the head of the four-thousand-man Allied Translator and Interpreter Section, Col. Sidney Mashbir, had caught it and gone to his boss, General Willoughby. Willoughby, German-born and a master of several languages, immediately set up a meeting for Mashbir to see MacArthur. They spent an hour together, discussing the distinctions between “temporal power” and “spiritual power” and how the emperor fitted in. At the end of the meeting MacArthur had given Mashbir complete authority to rewrite the surrender document to conform to Japanese usage, and closed the meeting with the words: “If at any time you feel that there is anything I should know, I want you to come straight to me with it. Don’t hesitate.” That’s how MacArthur ran his organization: If someone had a serious problem, come straight to him.

  MacArthur was no lawyer, bu
t he had the brains of a good one. In fact, if he hadn’t admired his father enough to follow in his footsteps and become a general, his choice of career would have been law. The legal implications of this translation error may have escaped the non-lawyer or the incompetent one, but they didn’t escape MacArthur. Someone in Washington had screwed up, big-time. Had the surrender documents contained language improperly prepared under Japanese law, then at any time in the future the Japanese government could have said the surrender was invalid. . . .

  It was all a page out of Santayana, about people not remembering the past being condemned to repeat it. Wasn’t this exactly how the Nazis had justified themselves: by repudiating the legality of the Treaty of Versailles? Their argument, which had merit, was that Germany—technically speaking—had never surrendered, which in turn meant that the reparations demands had no legal standing and therefore were improper.

  Looking out the window and far off into the distance, where Japan must be, he had his fingers crossed, hoping that the Eighth Army under General Eichelberger had everything under control. How ironic that his top general in Japan was the holder of two medals from the Japanese government: the Imperial Order of Meiji, aka the Order of the Rising Sun, and the Order of the Sacred Treasure. As a member of the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia in 1919–20, Eichelberger had been awarded these medals for helping the Japanese fight the Bolsheviks. Imagine what the Japanese would think if he were to wear these medals on his army uniform now!

  MacArthur knew the Japanese were playing possum. They had been ordered to lay down their arms, and every report from his commanders on the ground had confirmed this. Even Eichelberger said so. But he knew Eichelberger well enough to know that Eichelberger slept with one eye open. Especially when it came to the Japanese. Eichelberger understood the Japanese militarists better than anyone in America: He had served with them for two and a half years in Siberia and had not come home brimming with affection. Quite the contrary; after watching the Japanese surprise everyone by bringing in 125,000 men instead of 12,000, Eichelberger had warned his superiors in Washington, his two Japanese medals notwithstanding: “The Japanese High Command . . . managed to achieve for itself a record of complete perfidy, of the blackest and most heinous double-dealing.”

  Can’t get more blunt than that.

  MacArthur reflected on the report he had received from Col. Charles Tench, his aide who had led the fleet of planes that landed on August 26 to prepare the Atsugi airstrip for MacArthur’s arrival on August 30. One of the people greeting Tench was a Russian: “I am Commander Anatoliy Rodionov, Naval Attaché of the Soviet Union in Japan. Welcome.” What the heck were the Russians doing here? Outrageous, these Russians, having declared war only one day after the bombing of Nagasaki, already trying to grab a piece of the victor’s spoils. MacArthur never liked them anyway. Now he loathed them. Then to top it all off, they had handed Tench a letter from Jacob Malik, Russian ambassador to Japan, to be delivered to MacArthur, asking for passes to the surrender ceremonies. What nerve!

  MacArthur had tossed the letter aside. Many people back in Washington may have been pleased that the Russians were joining the war against Japan; MacArthur was not one of them. The Russians weren’t needed, they were just crashing the victory party.

  MacArthur had good reason to abhor the Russians. Ostensible allies in the war against Germany, they had almost cost MacArthur his life. In October 1944, a senior official in the Russian Foreign Ministry had tipped off the Japanese ambassador in Moscow that the American forces were getting ready to attack in the Philippines. Four days later a top Japanese general and the country’s legendary hero, Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, arrived in Manila. Every bit as arrogant and self-confident as MacArthur, Yamashita electrified everyone by declaring that he was going to teach MacArthur a lesson and dictate surrender terms in the Philippines.

  In due course MacArthur would have the immense pleasure of dealing with the butcher Yamashita, but he would never forgive the Russians for having put this general against him, thus causing many needless American deaths.

  MacArthur was not a man who, once he made a decision or developed a plan, was racked with self-doubts or what-ifs. He had to be pleased with himself that day, having just received a cable from Secretary of War Stimson calling him the “principal architect” of the Pacific victory and citing him for “brilliant planning” and an “enterprise [that] has grown in scope and boldness.” Boldness, he liked that word. His plan to land in Japan and take it over was a daring one: to hit his first area of occupation with sizable forces and pour men in rapidly behind the first troops. The Japanese would have no room for surprise maneuvers. In keeping with his tactics of what the New York Times would soon tout as his “fool-proof”occupation, he would establish a beachhead and seal off Tokyo and annex the great port of Yokohama, without actually taking over Tokyo. This had now been done. Next, he would extend his lines to take in Tokyo and adjacent areas. Then, and only then, would he gradually fan out, as more divisions came ashore to take over all of Honshu Island.

  War Department officials had warned him to be completely on guard against Japanese treachery. Yes, that was a serious possibility, but MacArthur was betting on another trick up his sleeve, a psychological one. The Japanese had yet to receive the full details of American surrender terms. Everything was very much up in the air, meaning there was nothing specific for Japanese militarists to focus their rancor on. Everyone in Japan was waiting to see what MacArthur would do. He had, if you could call it that, a grace period. By the time it expired, MacArthur would have so many troops in Japan that the Japanese would realize the futility of last-ditch resistance.

  But for this plan to work it was essential that this landing at Atsugi go off perfectly.

  Corncob pipe in hand, he spent forty minutes of the three-hour flight walking up and down the aisle, deep in thought. Speaking out to his fellow generals, he astonished them by giving a lecture and announcing his major priorities for the occupation—as if he had no concern about kamikazes and assassins waiting for them in Japan:

  First destroy the military power . . .

  Then build the structure of representative government . . .

  Enfranchise the women . . .

  Free the political prisoners . . .

  Liberate the farmers . . .

  Establish a free labor movement . . .

  Encourage a free economy . . .

  Abolish police oppression . . .

  Develop a free and responsible press . . .

  Liberalize education . . .

  Decentralize the political power.

  That was it: eleven priorities. Eleven major tasks to accomplish, with the entire world watching. From the tone of his voice, everyone on the plane knew he was not shooting the breeze or thumping his chest, he was dead serious. He had a plan. He was thoroughly prepared.

  They were impressed—as MacArthur wanted them to be. In his Reminiscences he wrote: “From the moment of my appointment as supreme commander, I had formulated the policies I intended to follow, implementing them through the Emperor and the machinery of the imperial government.”

  Had he really? As was often the case with MacArthur, he was guilty of exaggeration. The day before, he had received via military radio from Washington the fifth draft of Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan, a policy document under development for more than a year. What MacArthur had actually done was take a poorly written document and translate its key points into language everyone could understand.

  Helping people better understand Washington government memorandums is all well and good, but as a general on a dangerous mission, MacArthur’s major objective was to ensure the safety of his people and himself. He couldn’t admit it, but he had good reason to be as terrified as his men about the security at Atsugi. Had the Japanese, as ordered, subdued the thousands of kamikaze pilots and removed the propellers from all the airplanes? He knew the country they were flying into was heavily armed, with 2.2 million soldiers at beck and ca
ll. More specifically he was flying directly into the dragon’s mouth, the headquarters of the so-called Divine Wind Squadrons. He had only 4,000 American troops in the immediate area of Atsugi; the Japanese had more than 300,000. Up until two days before, diehard Japanese pilots had been dropping leaflets over the cities and countryside, urging the people to carry on the fight. “Resist with tooth and nail!” . . . “Destroy MacArthur’s plane!” . . . “The American army devils are coming!” . . . “Send the women and children to the mountains!” The country was swarming with disgruntled militarists and terrorists for whom killing was an act of honor. He, Douglas MacArthur, was the “Most Wanted Man” in this nation; it would take only a single bullet. And he was not the only one. Already, on August 15, there had been an attack by thirty-two young Japanese officers on the emperor’s palace after the emperor had made his concession statement. They claimed he was not the real Hirohito and that his radio announcement was a fake masterminded by the Americans.* They killed the commanding general of the Imperial Guard Division, and set fire to and machine-gunned the home of the prime minister, Kantaro Suzuki. By the time the bloodbath was over, all thirty-two rebels and six guards were dead. American troops were now in Atsugi and Yokohama, but not yet in Tokyo; they had been warned by the Japanese army that it needed a few more days to clean up the city and ensure there were no renegades running around. In the meantime another group of ultranationalists, belonging to the Black Dragon Society, had made two attempts to assassinate the prime minister. When those failed, they tried to kill the head of the Privy Council (an advisory board to the emperor). When would this all end? The only comfort for MacArthur was that the U.S. Navy under Admiral Halsey had an armada offshore consisting of twelve American battleships, two British battleships, and seventeen aircraft carriers with a hundred-plus planes to darken the sky—enough firepower to decimate the Japanese into oblivion should they try any funny business at Atsugi.