Supreme Commander

by Seymour Morris, Jr.

  Originally drafted by the State Department in the spring of 1944 and submitted to the Subcommittee for the Far East (SFE) under the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), this document after review by various agencies had gone through seven versions before finally being signed by the president as document SWNCC150/4/A. To be expected of a document emanating from many fathers, it was bureaucratese to the core, so vague and poorly organized as to be virtually useless to the man entrusted with implementing it, Douglas MacArthur. To summarize the document, the objectives of the occupation were to ensure that Japan did not become a menace to the world, and to impose a democratic self-government consistent with the freely imposed will of the people. The occupation would accomplish this by disarming and demilitarizing the country, promoting democratic and representative organizations, and strengthening the economy. Should there be differences among the Allied Powers, “the policies of the United States will govern.” The supreme commander (appointed by the United States) would exercise sole executive power, and would work with the existing Japanese government to whatever extent he deemed feasible in reforming its “feudal and authoritarian tendencies.” Militarists would be removed from office and war criminals put on trial. War production factories would be dismantled and large economic monopolies broken up. Democratic parties and groups would be encouraged, and citizens’ individual rights would be protected.

  Thus ended what was essentially a wish list. How it was to be achieved was up to MacArthur. It was his job to clarify the policy, develop the strategy, set priorities and deadlines, and manage the operation. The most important line in the document was the one that defined his role: “The authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government will be subject to the Supreme Commander, who will possess all powers necessary to effectuate the surrender terms and to carry out the policies established for the conduct of the occupation and the control of Japan.”

  “All powers necessary. . . . ” The next sentence is interesting: It talks about “the desire of the United States to attain its objectives with a minimum commitment of its forces and resources.” That is exactly what MacArthur was doing when he talked about how he hoped to reduce American troops from 500,000 to 200,000: He was exercising his powers in trying to fulfill a major “desire of the United States”—demobilization. President Truman may not have been happy about MacArthur stating U.S. policy so forcefully and revealing specific dates and troop numbers, but it was a lot better than if MacArthur had said he needed a million men.

  To use examples from the Civil War, generals can be divided into those like the infamous George McClellan, who need twice as many men as the enemy before they dare attack, and others like Grant, who don’t complain and make do with whatever they’ve got. MacArthur was the latter. At a time when Americans were weary of war, and mothers, wives, and girlfriends wanted their boys back home, the size of forces available for MacArthur would have to be lean. One month later, in October, the issue of how many troops MacArthur needed came up again. He received a wire from the army chief of staff, General Marshall, saying Truman wanted to know whether MacArthur could reduce the minimum of 200,000 which he had contemplated. MacArthur chuckled over that one. In a conversation with General Eichelberger he said: “It seems funny that they should now be asking me to reduce below 200,000 when you think of all the fuss they made when I advanced the idea that 200,000 would be enough.”

  But MacArthur still wasn’t out of the doghouse with the president. He had been invited by Truman to make a trip back to the United States for a meeting and “to receive the plaudits of a grateful nation.” To Truman’s surprise, MacArthur passed, claiming it would be “unwise” to leave Japan because of “the delicate and difficult situation which prevails here.” In October, Truman issued a second invitation for MacArthur “to make a trip home at such time [as] you feel you can safely leave your duties.” The president even offered an enticement: Would the general like to address a joint session of Congress? Again MacArthur passed, citing “the extraordinarily dangerous and inherently inflammable situation which exists here.”

  From the president’s point of view, only a man of MacArthur’s oversize ego could dare such effrontery—a slight the president would not forget. Truman could only wonder how MacArthur would have reacted if one of his subordinates had said he was too busy to see him.

  Except that Truman totally missed the point. Japan was conquered, but was it really? MacArthur was the commander of a hostile nation known for kamikazes. At any moment a bomb could go off or someone prominent be assassinated, and the war on Japan would resume in a second. Guerrilla bands of terrorists could strike anytime. To suggest (“order”) your general in Japan to come home for a week of celebration was pipe-dreaming, in MacArthur’s view. He had no choice: He must stay on duty. He had a job to do, and he could not afford to leave, much though he might have relished returning home to a hero’s welcome. In Japan, MacArthur was beginning the role of a lifetime, an opportunity few people ever get, one that must be seized and savored in its fleeting fullest. For Douglas MacArthur, the key operating words out of the numerous instructions he got from Washington came from the president himself: “Your authority is supreme.”

  Supreme.

  Now, when a word like that is attached to a man, especially a general, it can quickly go to his head (one thinks of Mussolini in this regard). For someone who had spent his entire life cloistered in the bowels of the military, his every expense and personal whim paid for by the government, MacArthur—most curiously—had a fervently negative view of socialism and big government. Consider an argument he once had in the Philippines with his chief of staff, Lt. Col. Richard Sutherland. They were at a dinner party, and Sutherland was espousing strong views about the advantages a dictatorship had in waging war. According to one of the other officers present:

  General MacArthur told Sutherland he was wrong; that democracy works and will always work, because the people are allowed to think, to talk, and to keep their minds free, open, and supple. He said that while the dictator state may plan a war, get everything worked out down to the last detail, launch the attack, and do pretty well at the beginning, eventually something goes wrong with the plan. Something interrupts the schedule. Now, the regimented minds of the dictator command are not flexible enough to handle quickly the changed situation. They have tried to make war a science when it is actually an art.

  In a democracy, MacArthur was saying, there will be hundreds of free-thinking people to spot a dictator’s errors and devise better methods. A democracy may be at a disadvantage at first when war comes, but eventually it will win. It may be inefficient and wasteful, but in the end it always will perform best.

  By “democracy” he did not mean a chorus of voices having equal weight regardless of their merits. Leadership in a democracy meant being first among equals, and if he didn’t consider the people he had to deal with to be equals, he could be ruthless in cutting them off. To appease the feelings of other nations, and fearful of what it regarded as MacArthur’s dangerous appetite for power, the State Department had created two advisory organizations. However, if President Truman thought these organizations would rein in MacArthur, he was mistaken.

  The first was the Far Eastern Commission (FEC), consisting of the United States and the eight other signatories to the surrender document, plus China and the Philippines (with Burma and Pakistan added later, in 1948). Formed in the gallant spirit of the United Nations, its purpose was to give those countries that had suffered from Japan’s aggression a chance to influence the rehabilitation of their former enemy. In late November 1945 MacArthur invited the commission to visit Japan to see actual conditions firsthand and to provide him the “greatest possible aid.” The delegates arrived the day after Christmas and got treated to a tour of eight Japanese cities in addition to extensive briefings by SCAP officials, plus extensive time with the supreme commander himself. His charm could be overwhelming. Back in Washington, the commission chairman wrote a letter to Secretary o
f State James Byrnes that sounded as if it could have been written by MacArthur himself:

  The most satisfactory result of the Commission’s visit, from the point of view of the United States, was the feeling of confidence in the Supreme Commander engendered in the minds of the foreign representatives. Regardless of their views concerning the policies established by the United States for the control of Japan, all delegates are convinced that these policies are being carried out effectively and with the utmost wisdom by the Supreme Commander and his staff. They were all impressed by General MacArthur’s grasp of the problems which face him and by the statesmanship he has shown in performing his difficult task.

  Because it was based in Washington the commission could really do nothing but send memos, which more often than not were read quickly and promptly filed away in some basement storage room. When significant issues came up MacArthur could be fearless in using his power. He got into a major row with Australia and China when he allowed Japan to conduct deep-sea whaling off the coasts of China and the Philippines; even the British got aroused when he permitted Japanese whalers to go as far south as the Antarctic. The protesting nations lodged formal complaints with the State Department, only to be told nothing could be done to counteract whatever MacArthur decreed, his authority being inherent in his position as supreme commander.

  The other advisory organization was the Allied Council for Japan (ACJ), based in Tokyo and consisting of the United States, the USSR, China, and the United Kingdom (representing itself, Australia, New Zealand, and India). Whereas the FEC was to set the general policy of the occupation, the ACJ was to advise on its execution. The council would meet once a week to “consult and advise” MacArthur. The idea was that if any members had disagreements of a fundamental nature with the supreme commander, he would seek their agreement before issuing his orders. Here MacArthur proved himself to be a master of the hidden dagger. In his April 5, 1946, address to the ACJ, he put the members—especially the Soviets—in their place:

  I welcome you with utmost cordiality in the earnest anticipation that . . . your deliberations throughout shall be governed by goodwill, mutual understanding and broad tolerance. As the functions of the Council will be advisory and consultative, it will not divide the heavy administrative responsibility of the Supreme Commander as the sole executive authority for the Allied Powers in Japan, but it will make available to him the several viewpoints of its members on questions of policy and action. I hope it will prove to be a valuable factor in the future solution of many problems.

  In other words, take it or leave it. The delegates nodded in agreement that their views would be consulted, but the Russians knew toughness when they saw it. Their response was one of grudging admiration: “Now there’s a man!” The council met for more than 160 sessions; MacArthur never attended any of them, leaving the United States to be represented by one of his officials. With the State Department he was more blunt: He told the department he would do things his way, otherwise he might as well “quit and go home.”

  Even Japan felt the ax of his decisiveness. As supreme commander he exercised his full power to withhold his support of the Japanese government when he felt it appropriate, like the time he told the Japanese foreign minister: “Baron Shidehara may thereafter be acceptable to the Emperor as the next Prime Minister, but he will not be acceptable to me.”

  Asked if he understood what MacArthur meant, the minister replied: “Too clear!”

  MacArthur would be a strongman, but he would not be a dictator seeking to stay in power forever. He had too great an appreciation of history not to recognize that military occupations are never popular and never last long. Bismarck had once said, “Fools say they learn by experience. I prefer to learn by other people’s experience.” MacArthur preferred the ultimate source of Bismarck’s quote, the saying by the ancient Greek historian Polybius (200–118 B.C.): “There are two roads—one through the misfortune of their own, the other through those of others; the former is the most unmistakable, the latter the less painful.”

  He knew Japan was a country like Germany in World War I, a country that had never been defeated on its own soil. He was ruling a nation in a state of shock that would soon wear off. Japan had no choice but to accept whatever reforms he imposed, no matter how drastic they might seem. It was a great experiment he was undertaking, he wrote, “the world’s greatest laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of a people from totalitarian military rule and for the liberation of government from within. . . . Yet history clearly showed that no modern military occupation of a conquered nation had been a success.”

  “Military occupation was not new to me,” he continued:

  I had garrisoned the West Bank of the Rhine as commander of the Rainbow Division at the end of World War One. At first hand I had seen what I thought were basic and fundamental weaknesses in prior forms of military occupations: the substitution of civil by military authority; the loss of self-respect and self-confidence by the people; the constantly growing ascendancy of centralized dictatorial power instead of a localized and representative system; the lowering of spiritual and moral tone of a population controlled by foreign bayonets; the inevitable deterioration of the occupying forces themselves as the disease of power infiltrated their ranks and bred a sort of race superiority.

  If any occupation lasts too long, or is not carefully watched from the start, one party becomes slaves and the other masters. History teaches, too, that almost every military occupation breeds new wars of the future. I had studied the lives of Alexander and Caesar and Napoleon, and great as these captains were, all had suffered when they became the leaders of the occupation forces. I tried to remember the lessons my own father had taught me, lessons learned out of his experience as military governor of the Philippines, but I was assailed by the greatest misgivings. With such hazards as I anticipated, could I succeed? My doubts were to be my best safeguard, my fears my greatest strength.

  7

  The Photograph That Saved a Thousand Ships

  ON SEPTEMBER 27, a meeting took place that would shape the destiny of both victor and vanquished. Unlike the public glare of the deck of the Missouri, this meeting was held inside an embassy. Unlike the treaty signing, known well in advance, nobody in the outside world knew this meeting had taken place until it was over. No transcript was ever made. There were no witnesses, just a single Japanese translator who kept his mouth shut and wrote no memoir. Unheard of for such a pivotal meeting, there was no specific agenda or clear concept of goals and objectives. It was more a touchy-feely exercise of two men groping in the dark, checking each other out. The real communication lay not in what one man said, but in how the other man responded.

  The two men, of course, were the supreme commander and the emperor.

  At the meeting a photograph was taken. It caused a sensation, for never before had the Son of Heaven permitted himself to be photographed with a mere commoner, much less with an enemy. Like Helen of Troy, “the face that launched a thousand ships,” this photograph—more than anything else—kept the peace and saved the United States from having to launch a massive invasion to keep Japan subdued.

  Coming so soon after his Atsugi landing and the Missouri surrender ceremony, it demonstrated MacArthur at his best in terms of his flair for the dramatic.

  “Welcome, Sir.” The emperor, dumbfounded, a man not used to shaking hands, stepped out of his limousine and found himself greeted by General Bonner Fellers, MacArthur’s chief of counterintelligence. Little did he know what this man had written about him: “As Emperor and acknowledged head of the State, Hirohito cannot sidestep war guilt. He is part of and must be considered an instigator of the Pacific war . . . whether or not Pearl Harbor was against the Emperor’s will is of little consequence . . . inescapably he is responsible.” In other words, Hirohito might as well get ready for the hangman’s noose.

  Fortunately for the emperor, this man so anxious to meet him in person and look into his eyes was also the one who, more th
an any other American advisor to MacArthur, would save his life. For it was this general with the unusual name who had been advocating from day one, both in Washington when he worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, now the CIA) and when he served as chief of psychological warfare in the Pacific before joining MacArthur in the Philippines, that the emperor should not be hanged as a war criminal. To the Japanese, said Fellers, hanging the emperor “would be comparable to the crucifixion of Christ to us. All would fight to die like ants.”

  If the emperor didn’t know how precariously his life hung in the balance, he certainly had been reminded of it ten minutes earlier, when his car stopped at a traffic light. A traffic light! Emperors’ cars do not stop at traffic lights; traffic lights stop for them. Not this time. The American GI acting as traffic cop—security was especially tight that morning—flashed a smile at the waiting imperial Daimler while making sure the next street was clear before waving the three cars on. Understandably the emperor’s stomach was churning at this brazen demonstration of his smallness. He had no idea what to expect other than that when he arrived at the American Embassy he would be greeted, as befitted an emperor, by General MacArthur himself.

  But MacArthur was not there.

  “I am honored to meet you,” said Fellers. The two men shook hands.*

  Fellers ushered the emperor and his entourage into the building, where Maj. Faubion Bowers, fluent in Japanese, shocked the group by instructing the entourage of Japanese officials to wait downstairs while he escorted Hirohito and his personal interpreter upstairs to meet MacArthur alone. The emperor, observed Bowers, looked “frightened to death. As I took his top hat, I noticed his hands were trembling. On meeting MacArthur on the threshold, he bowed low, very low, a servant’s bow.”