Supreme Commander

by Seymour Morris, Jr.

  MacArthur was hardly a man to hide his own light. He enjoyed reading articles about himself, especially a Fortune 1946 poll of “Most Admired Military Leaders” showing him neck and neck with Eisenhower (Eisenhower at 39 percent and MacArthur at 37 percent, followed by Patton at 6 percent, Halsey at 4, Nimitz and Marshall at 3 each, and Bradley, King, and Spruance at less than 1 each). He was a man afflicted with what is known a “presidential disease,” a state of mind that can cause many men to think foolish things. When Herbert Hoover visited him in 1946 to discuss Japan’s food shortage, the most exciting part of their discussion was when Hoover exhorted him to run for president in 1948. The following month, MacArthur got a visit from his former aide Dwight Eisenhower, now army chief of staff. After dinner they talked till midnight, teasing each other about who would be the first to seek the 1948 Republican nomination. It was heady talk for “the Beau Brummell of the trenches,” the “d’Artagnan of the battlefield,” the “Napoleon of Luzon,” the nonpolitician rated by Americans in a December 1945 Gallup poll as the “most qualified” to be U.S. president (ahead of Eisenhower) and the “most admired man in the world” according to a June 1946 Gallup poll (putting him ahead of Truman and Eisenhower). Both of these generals, both celebrated, both avid readers of history, knew they had history on their side. Out of the thirty-three presidents to date, eight had been generals.*

  MacArthur had good reason to think he was looking at the end of the rainbow. His accomplishments in Japan were attracting notice in America. In a June 1946 poll rating America’s two occupations, 60 percent of Americans said the United States was doing “a good job” in Japan, compared with only 31 percent in Germany. MacArthur studied these polls like a general surveying the terrain. He was a vain man, puffed with his own brilliance, but he was not obtuse. The same Gallup poll that had him “most admired” also revealed that the number of people who had confidence in him as a civilian leader was extremely small. When asked their first choice of presidential nominee, the percentage of Republicans citing MacArthur was less than 10 percent.

  The supreme commander had no serious intention of running for president. If he had, he would have returned to the United States, met with Republican leaders, and participated in rallies to get a bandwagon rolling. His apparent interest in doing so was a feint—to put the Truman administration on notice that he was not to be trifled with. He had seen enough of the office politics going on among the Joint Chiefs and especially the State Department to know he would need a lot of power to pull off his Tokyo job successfully. What better way to tell the bureaucrats in Washington “Hands off!” than to have in his pocket something none of them had—a lot of votes?

  Talk of MacArthur running for president did not make him friends in the Truman administration, but it elevated his stature in Japan. Posters and banners appeared everywhere, promoting “MacArthur for President.” The hoopla lasted until the 1948 Minnesota primary, where MacArthur’s in-absentia campaign garnered only 1 percent of the vote and quickly fizzled.

  FOR A MAN with such a huge ego, MacArthur was surprisingly human, a man with heart. When Admiral Halsey came to say good-bye after several days in Tokyo, MacArthur told him how much Halsey meant to him: “When you leave the Pacific, Bill, it becomes just another ocean.” When Bob Eichelberger came out of the jungles of Buna the victor, MacArthur had a chocolate milkshake waiting for him. MacArthur did not flaunt his medals or act like a swashbuckler as did Pershing or Patton. He was a very private man, but he was not a statue. One day when he was walking to his car at lunchtime, a woman in a kimono broke free of the crowd and prostrated herself before MacArthur. Gently he picked her up, “Now, now,” he said, “we don’t do that sort of thing anymore,” patted her on the shoulder, and sent her on her way. On another occasion he was walking into an elevator and saw a Japanese construction worker, embarrassed, stepping out so the supreme commander could have the elevator all to himself. MacArthur would have none of it, and insisted the man ride up in the elevator with him. Several days later MacArthur received a letter from this man: “I realize that no Japanese general would ever have done as you did.”

  Then there was the day of any leader’s worst nightmare: A man with a knife tried to go after MacArthur. After the would-be assassin spent several days in jail, MacArthur invited him to his office for a cup of tea and to talk for an hour. MacArthur ordered the man released, and the man went away, MacArthur’s greatest admirer. (For obvious reasons MacArthur refused to publicize the incident; it remained a secret for over forty years.) Like many great men, MacArthur was a man of contradictions. Said his air commander, General Kenney: MacArthur is “a hard-headed softie.” (Another oxymoron for MacArthur: Calling this Medal of Honor general “Dugout Doug” was like calling a fat man “skinny.”)

  Best known in photographs for his corncob pipe, other than at Atsugi he never appeared with it in public when he ruled Japan. “They’d think I was a farmer,” he joked. On the other hand, his practice of being driven back and forth to his office twice a day at the same time—“a target slower than a duck at an amusement park,” he called it—scared his colonels but deterred him not at all: “I count on the Japanese people to protect me.” As at Atsugi, his appearing unarmed in public was an essential part of his job description: to establish a bond with his followers. His obvious trust in the Japanese people made a powerful impression and brought out the best in them. When an American colonel, concerned about the large crowd being so close to the car, put up signs warning “Japanese stay away,” MacArthur ordered the signs removed. To his Japanese subjects he was a distant man, yet a close one.

  16

  Russian Trouble

  THERE WAS NO love lost between the Russians and the Japanese. Jumping into the war so suddenly at the last minute, just two days after Hiroshima, made the Russians look insidious and treacherous to the Japanese—just as the Japanese had appeared to the Americans after Pearl Harbor. MacArthur, who had welcomed the Russian entry into the Pacific War in 1943–44, when he needed all the help he could get, had a different reaction in August 1945, when the Soviets started claiming there should be two supreme commanders: the Russian marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky as well as Douglas MacArthur. Averell Harriman, the American ambassador to the USSR, got so angry he walked out of a meeting with Stalin, resulting in a frantic message from Stalin’s office saying there had been “a slight misunderstanding.” Slight? Hardly: Harriman had called the Russians’ bluff.

  At the Missouri surrender signing, Rear Adm. Tomioka Sadatoshi, one of the official representatives of the Japanese navy, was watching the pompous body language of the Soviet representative, Lt. Gen. Kuzma Derevyanko. Sadatoshi whispered to his aide: “With the end of World War II, there is sure to be a confrontation between democracy and communism . . . between the U.S. and communism. In the rift between them Japan can find a chance to regain its feet.”

  In its one-week war with Japan after four years of neutrality since 1941, Russia had grabbed the Kuriles, Sakhalin, Manchuria, and North Korea and showed no signs of moving out. In February 1946 Harriman visited Japan and warned MacArthur of the Communist threat in Asia. The threat would bear careful watching, especially as it spread to Japan. Already the Russians were demanding that their troops occupy the northern island of Japan, Hokkaido, thus dividing the country in two. General Derevyanko, in a heated meeting, threatened to send in his troops whether MacArthur liked it or not. You do that, replied MacArthur, you will regret it: “If the Soviets attempt to place any troops on those islands, I will throw seventeen divisions in that area, I’ll decimate every Soviet soldier on the island and I will then throw you in jail.” Derevyanko, knowing MacArthur’s record as a general, stared at him and responded, “My God, I believe you would.” MacArthur grinned: He liked this rogue. Derevyanko was a real ladies’ man, reputed to be the best dancer in all of Tokyo. MacArthur was reminded of the time he was asked to leave the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria in New York for dancing with his boot spurs on.

  Der
evyanko had a huge staff of four hundred people, five times the size of any other embassy. What were these people doing? Enough to keep Willoughby’s men busy (though they never did come up with much). The Soviets offered to send troops to help maintain the peace. There was peace already. MacArthur put them in their place by saying that any Allied troops would have to report to him; the Russians backed off. When the USSR sent a memo protesting SCAP’s purge of the Japanese Communist leaders, MacArthur responded: “I have received your note, and have carefully considered its context in vain in search of some small semblance of merit and validity. Rarely indeed have I perused such a conglomeration of misstatement, misrepresentation, and prevarication of fact.”

  Such language did not make Stalin happy. He complained to Harriman that Derevyanko was being treated “like a piece of extra furniture.” Harriman, who must have tried his hardest not to show his glee, was one of the few people in Washington who had always liked MacArthur. Now he liked MacArthur even more. He dashed off a cable to Secretary of State Byrnes reporting that Derevyanko was nothing but trouble:

  He has endeavored to utilize Allied Council as inquisitorial and investigative body by presenting requests for unnecessary detailed information on wide range of subjects and making hypocritical statements. . . . His agents have encouraged mob violence by discontented elements and he himself has made public defense of demonstrations instigated or led by Japanese Communists and has persistently attacked Japanese government and its members as “reactionaries.”

  A story (best savored over several shots of vodka) that made the rounds of the Russian Embassy was about Derevyanko calling on the supreme commander before returning to Moscow to present a report. MacArthur took the opportunity to give the Soviet representative a full one-hour lecture on what was wrong with Russian foreign policy. Instructing him to be sure to tell Stalin exactly what he said, the supreme commander ordered the general to raise his right hand and repeat his comments. A year went by, no sign of Derevyanko. Finally he returned and paid MacArthur a courtesy visit. “Why, General Derevyanko! Delighted to see you!” teased MacArthur. “When you failed to return, I feared they had shot you!”

  On another occasion Derevyanko went to the office of Gen. Elliott Thorpe and demanded that he censor the negative stories about Russian misconduct toward its Japanese prisoners in Manchuria; this was simply unacceptable. Thorpe asked if he denied the truth of these stories. Derevyanko said that was beside the point, the stories were negative and had to stop. Thorpe asked MacArthur what he should tell the Russians. “Tell them whatever you want to,” said the supreme commander. “Why don’t you just tell them to go to hell? . . . That’s a good idea, just tell them to go to hell.” The next day Thorpe met with Derevyanko: “General MacArthur says you can go to hell.”

  Without batting an eye Derevyanko responded: “Well, I had to ask, you know.”

  The Russians had their own ideas how to reform Japan. They wanted to treat the emperor as a war criminal, put in jail anyone suspected of war profiteering, redistribute the wealth, and deny the vote to anyone who was not a Communist. In the chaos and poverty of postwar Japan, stopping these fantasies at the gate required a vigilant sheriff. Commented Elizabeth Vining: “Japan is in heaven now, but sometimes a cold wind blows in from Russia.”

  What the Russians were hoping to do was what they had done in Germany: set up a separate zone of occupation. MacArthur refused to even consider it. As for the four hundred Russians already in Japan supposedly as part of the government mission, he devised an ingenious way to keep them in their place. Americans weren’t allowed to travel more than twenty-five miles outside Moscow, so the same should apply here: No travel beyond twenty-five miles outside Tokyo. This put a crimp on the Russians and prevented them from interacting with the population in the countryside as the Americans could.

  Even if they couldn’t do much inside Japan, the Soviets could still hurt Japan abroad. They did this in two ways. In the dispute over reparations they claimed the Japanese property they had seized in Manchuria and Korea should be treated as war booty rather than reparations. This was not a minor dispute: MacArthur valued this property at $50 billion (Washington valued it much lower). He succeeded in getting this theft categorized as reparations, but he could do little about the second act, where the Russians stalled for four years before letting their Japanese prisoners in Manchuria come home. During this time they indoctrinated these prisoners to become Communist agents and stir up trouble when they eventually returned to Japan. This would cause MacArthur and Willoughby major problems in the later years of the occupation.

  The Americans were in Japan to promote democracy. A basic tenet of democracy is freedom of speech, even if the privilege also applies to one’s enemies. One of the supreme commander’s very first acts was his October 3, 1945, directive, sometimes referred to as the “Japanese Bill of Rights,” where he granted unprecedented freedom of thought and political action. The directive demanded that the government free all political prisoners—including Communists—and to “abrogate and immediately suspend the operation of all provisions of all laws, decrees, orders, ordinances, and regulations which establish or maintain restrictions on freedom of thought, of religion, of assembly, and of speech.”

  Many Japanese were puzzled at MacArthur letting the Communists out of jail. They would be even more mystified when the supreme commander, after releasing the Communist prisoners, started censoring their publications for potential treason. Why hadn’t he kept them in jail in the first place? For the Japanese, how strange it must have seemed to see Communist speakers uttering their harangues in public parks and school auditoriums, flanked by red flags and protected by U.S. military police!

  The only thanks MacArthur got from the Communists were blustering propaganda broadsides about subservience to the American occupation. He kept his cool and had George Atcheson launch attacks on Derevyanko and the lack of civil rights in the USSR. Democracy was a weapon, and he had no compunction about using it. He would permit democracy to the fullest.

  If the Communists gained power and influence, so be it; if they gained too much power and threatened to take over Japan, well, that was a risk he would have to take. It would be up to him to communicate, with words and deeds, a more compelling political message. In early 1946 he instructed Atcheson to tell the ACJ that the United States “does not favor Communism at home or in Japan.” He then followed up by making numerous pronouncements about the basic incompatibility of Communism and democracy, being careful to make the critical distinction between his views on Communism and the constitutional right of all Japanese to decide for themselves.

  The first showdown came in the April 1946 national election. Because MacArthur and SCAP had moved so quickly in instituting land reform, they easily beat the Communists, who marched forth with the tired slogan “Land for the Toiling Farmer.” What toiling farmer? The massive food shortage and black market prices had made farmers rich. A full 70 percent of them had paid for their land purchases with cash. “Japanese national farm debt melted away like snow under a spring sun,” wrote one Japanese journalist, “and the hitherto downtrodden peasant emerged suddenly as a man of means.” If the Communists were going to make headway in Japan, they would have to eschew their traditional target of land peasants and go after the office workers. There they struck pay dirt.

  It so happened that another of MacArthur’s early directives had encouraged the development and expansion of labor unions. Within a year more than a thousand labor unions emerged, boasting a membership of 6.6 million. Unlike the farmers, workers were getting hammered by inflation: 412 percent in 1946. Collective-bargaining efforts to achieve matching wages had gotten nowhere, leaving the door open for the Communists to march in.

  MacArthur was no left-wing ideologue and certainly no socialist, but there were two reasons why he was allowing the labor union movement unrestrained growth. One, Washington had ordered him to support the development of labor unions; and two, he believed, like Henry Ford whe
n he gave his auto workers the highest wages in the industry, that workers deserved a decent wage to live on. The prevailing average wage of twenty-five dollars a month simply didn’t cut it.

  In 1946 there was a looming showdown with government workers, who had not received a pay raise for months during a time of rampant inflation. The government was stalling, saying it had no money. Within the SCAP offices there was considerable debate about what to do. When it became apparent that the disagreements were becoming acrimonious, MacArthur called for a meeting of the two leading adversaries on his staff. One officer recommended a loose policy of doing nothing and letting the strikers and the Japanese government keep arguing; the other officer urged an overhaul of government compensation incorporating specific details about position classification, entrance examinations, training programs, performance evaluation, pay scales, tenure, transfer, retirement, and pensions. Each man, on his own initiative, announced he would resign if the decision went against him. Normally most executives would take offense at subordinates making such ultimatums. MacArthur, on the other hand, welcomed the opportunity to clarify the issue, even if one protagonist would have to go. The presentations were made, and MacArthur ruled in favor of the total, all-inclusive policy of compensation reform. He also announced that government employees would never be allowed “the use of so deadly a social weapon.” He wrote a letter to the prime minister, quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt to the effect that “a strike of public employees is unthinkable and intolerable,” and urged the Diet to revise the Civil Service Law and see to it that the new civil service commission ensured that government employees were properly compensated.

  MacArthur described his job as managing “a controlled revolution.” The drastic reforms he was imposing on the Japanese people amounted to nothing less. Revolutions are easy to start, which is why the history of mankind is replete with so many hundreds of them. Virtually all of them end badly: They spin out of control and devour their own children (the American Revolution of 1775–89 being the most notable exception). In controlling the revolution he had started, MacArthur must not impose more change than the Japanese could handle, lest revolutionary fervor get out of hand. He must always maintain control. In the case of labor unions, many officers in SCAP and back home in Washington fretted over the growing power of the Communists. Not MacArthur. He was willing to bet that the Communists would soon overreach. And when they did, he would be prepared to shoot them down, just like a general who has led the enemy into an ambush.