Supreme Commander

by Seymour Morris, Jr.

  By now the Communist Party had grown to 60,000 members (even more than the Bolshevik Party in 1917 czarist Russia, with 49,000 members). Revolutionary slogans filled the air; every few days rallies took place in the plaza of the Imperial Palace, now renamed “the People’s Palace” by the Communists. The Communists kept raising their wage demands beyond reason, thus revealing that their objective was not higher wages but an overthrow of the government. When SCAP civil affairs officer Carmen Johnson looked at a sample of labor union ballots, she was stunned to find that 80 percent were blank. When she demanded to know what was going on, the union leaders blithely told her “the Japanese cannot make up their minds how to vote.” Clearly the union leaders were stuffing the ballot boxes.

  The Communists, smelling victory, went for the jugular. Having attracted 3.4 million factory workers in addition to 2.6 million government employees, they announced they would proceed with a massive countrywide strike of 6 million people planned for February 1, 1947. Should this happen, MacArthur would have no choice but to use American troops to restore law and order—a most unwelcome prospect. He instructed General Marquat to warn the labor leaders that a strike of this magnitude—“a national calamity”—was against the country’s interest and would not be tolerated. The next day Marquat received a petition signed with the blood of fifty strikers—a declaration of war. The supreme commander continued negotiating with Communist union leaders to get them to drop the strike; it became clear they had little incentive to do so.

  A strike followed by American troops streaming in and beating up the strikers—a repeat of MacArthur’s disastrous attack on the Washington Bonus Marchers in 1932—would be an enormous propaganda victory for the Communists. When the Japanese government reached a mediated settlement with the strikers on January 29, the Communist leaders shot the agreement down. Tensions rose as the hours approached for the nationwide strike. General Eichelberger, the commander of the occupying U.S. Eighth Army, alerted MacArthur that a strike by the railroads could “ruin the Occupation.”

  Waiting until the last minute—nine hours before the strike was due to start—MacArthur finally made his move, so dramatic that it arrived with “the impact of a bomb.” But it was not what everyone expected: Instead of using force he would engage in a battle of wits with the union leaders over who had more power. “Under the authority vested in me as the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers,” he announced, “I have informed the labor leaders . . . that I will not permit the use of so deadly a social weapon in the present impoverished and emaciated condition of Japan and have accordingly directed them to desist from the furtherance of such action.”

  He didn’t just inform them, he hit them over the head, accusing the Japanese Communists of being “undisciplined elements” operating “under organized leadership” to foment “physical violence.” The gamble worked: so great was MacArthur’s prestige, and so forceful was his message, that the workers capitulated. The union leaders, caught by surprise at their workers’ response, were helpless. Efforts to rally their followers fell short. MacArthur had won the showdown, becoming more than ever a hero, not for busting the strike but for preserving order and doing it in a way that avoided any bloodshed. “We regret very much,” wrote the Mainichi newspaper, “that we have had to trouble the Supreme Commander to avert the grave disaster that was sure to follow.” “In one stroke,” said Blaine Hoover, SCAP’s chief of civil service reform, “General MacArthur had decapitated the creature which . . . had been gaining strength and was, even then, twining itself around the throat of the young Japanese democracy.”

  For the Communists, who had five seats in the House of Representatives and looked to get at least twenty in the forthcoming national election in April, the result was an abject humiliation. In the election, instead of a massive win they lost a seat. Never again would they be in a position to take over Japan. George F. Kennan, the leading authority on the worldwide Communist threat, could only marvel at what MacArthur had pulled off. Like the Mainichi newspaper, he admitted it, albeit grudgingly. Note his use of the word “cursory”: MacArthur’s policies, he wrote, “seemed, on cursory examination, to be such that if they had been devised for the specific purpose of rending Japanese society vulnerable to communist political pressures and paving the way for a communist takeover, they could scarcely have been other than what they were.”

  MacArthur, recognizing that government unions were a fertile recruiting ground for the Communists, followed up a year later by recommending to the prime minister that the National Public Service Law be amended to prevent collective bargaining or strikes by government workers. Immediately he got a letter from the Army Department demanding an explanation and implying that denial of collective-bargaining rights to government workers was contrary to U.S. policy. MacArthur took his time to develop a thorough response. This time he played hardball, threatening indirectly to go to his Republican friends in Congress. He explained that the issue in Japan had more to do with the danger of self-appointed radical leaders using the vehicle of a strike for their own personal ends than with the welfare of the workers—an issue recognized by the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee in its concern about the behavior of the Communist-controlled labor unions. “I know of nothing more calculated to impede recovery and destroy occupation gains already made through painstaking effort and heavy United States expense than to permit this trend toward disaster to continue,” he wrote. He went on to attribute the major source of trouble to a 1946 FEC decision encouraging trade unions to take part in political activities—a provision approved by the United States without his knowledge or, for that matter, the knowledge and approval of any senior official in the U.S. Army. . . .

  MacArthur did not treat this issue of bargaining rights lightly. In his view it was an issue only because the officials in Washington were trying to appease friendly allies, notably the United Kingdom and Australia, where labor governments ruled. In the United States, government officials were not allowed to strike, so why in Japan of all places? To put this issue to rest, he had a staff meeting with his senior officials to go over every aspect. A meeting with MacArthur rarely lasted more than twenty minutes; this one went on for seven full hours. In the final of his many letters to Washington, he pointed out that he did not think it was possible for agencies as far away as Washington “to prescribe with wisdom details for the best course for government in Japan.” Washington backed off, and when the Japanese Diet amended the Public Service Law as MacArthur requested, the issue finally went away.

  While MacArthur was fighting Communism in Japan and labor officials in Washington, the Russians were busy stirring up trouble. Though they may have suffered a setback in the 1946 Japanese election, they still had another weapon: Japanese war prisoners. At the time of the surrender the USSR claimed to have 594,000 Japanese prisoners in China and Manchuria; Japan claimed there were three times as many. It wasn’t until December 1946—fifteen months into the occupation—that Russia began to release its Japanese prisoners—only 71,000. Such prisoners, when they returned to Japan and were greeted by their families, were not the same men they had been. They had been thoroughly indoctrinated. (This loathsome practice, originating in Manchuria under the Soviets, is the origin of the phrase “Manchurian candidate.”) The Japanese were outraged. This was brainwashing of prisoners on a massive scale and of course represented a complete violation of the Geneva Conventions’ codes of conduct for treating prisoners of war.

  The Japanese demanded answers. In a meeting of the FEC, they asked the Russian member, General Derevyanko: “What happened to our sons?” Derevyanko refused to answer and walked out of the meeting. When asked why they were so slow to execute the 1945 repatriation agreement, the Russians resorted to numerous excuses, the lamest of which was that there was too much ice in the strait between Mongolia and Japan. MacArthur called this response nonsense, offering to send some icebreakers to Vladivostok. The Russians continued to stall, claiming the icebreakers were in ba
d condition and “would have endangered the lives of crew and passengers.” When that didn’t work they claimed that the Manchurian trains delivering prisoners to the ports were having engine trouble.

  For the rest of the occupation U.S. relations with the Soviet Union continued to deteriorate, especially as the number of Japanese “spies” increased and the Russians launched radio broadcasts from Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Moscow, accusing American imperialists of exploiting Japan and threatening world peace. Then the Chinese joined in. They got upset when MacArthur ordered the entire politburo of the Japanese Communist Party to be purged. Undaunted, MacArthur went even further and ordered a purge of Communists from the newspapers. Mao Zedong, now in power in China, jumped in and denounced “the American imperialists and their Japanese jackals.”

  The jackals in the Japanese government thought differently. In 1949, they set up a Special Investigation Bureau within the attorney general’s office to conduct surveillance of Communist activities. Its success in catching spies was limited. After the Korean War began, ten Communist leaders in Japan suddenly vanished into thin air; the bureau managed to find only one of them. Chortled a Russian military commander: “The Japanese and American bloodhounds have worn blisters on their feet searching for those loyal sons of Japanese people.”

  After MacArthur left Japan, the peace treaty between Japan and the Allied Powers was finally consummated in September 1951. Forty-nine countries signed. The Soviet Union was conspicuous in its absence: It refused to sign. For the rest of 1951 it made a major, largely unsuccessful effort to stimulate Japan-Soviet trade, and on January 1, 1952, Joseph Stalin sent a New Year’s message to Japan sympathizing with the Japanese “who are in difficult straits due to foreign occupation.” He could talk all he wanted; what mattered were the votes. From a high of 10 percent in the 1949 elections, the Communists dropped to 5.6 percent in 1950 and 2.5 percent in 1952. Never again would they threaten Japan. As he had in implementing a new Japanese constitution, Douglas MacArthur had won his war.

  After he retired as Japanese prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida was asked what was possibly MacArthur’s greatest contribution to Japan.

  Preserving Japan’s integrity and keeping the Russians out, he said.

  TO UNDERSTAND WHY this was so, a little counterfactual speculation may be helpful:

  Imagine that MacArthur had not been the supreme commander. Another man almost surely would have followed the State Department’s original plan to let Prince Konoe prepare a revised constitution. “There being no provisions in the State Department’s plan for establishing popular sovereignty and renouncing the right of belligerency, the corner stones of the subsequent MacArthur constitution,” wrote SCAP legal officer Justin Williams, “it may be assumed that, had the State Department’s revision plan been adopted, the old Japanese clique might very well have regained full control of post-occupation Japan.”

  The alternative supreme commander would have forwarded the Konoe draft to the State Department, which in turn, following Secretary of State Byrnes’ December 1945 instructions that all constitutional matters be referred to the FEC, would have submitted the revisions to the USSR. Russia, sitting on the Far Eastern Commission, would have shared them with the Japanese Communist Party—and had a field day eviscerating them. The situation would have become very muddled indeed.

  Washington had strongly advised MacArthur that if there was any domestic insurrection, the Eighth Army must not use its military force. The alternative supreme commander, lacking MacArthur’s spine of steel, would have followed such instructions and permitted the strikers to take over the streets, create economic chaos, and overthrow the conservative Japanese government. The new government, in the hands of labor extremists and protected by the Soviet veto in the ACJ in Tokyo, immediately issued a new constitution eliminating the emperor and forcing the Diet to install a plural voting system. As the April 1946 national election approached, the State Department, strongly sympathetic to the “agrarian reformers” led by Mao in China, tolerated the growing insurrection of workers, shopkeepers, tenant farmers, and intellectuals. At the war crimes trial of 1948, the Russians put the emperor on trial, where he was found guilty and sentenced to death. The Russian Embassy, free of MacArthur’s twenty-five-mile restriction, flooded the country with agents and provocateurs. The Japanese, ever respectful of power and seeking security at all costs, saw the handwriting on the wall: America’s promise of support meant little. The use of Japan as a major supply port for America’s massive invasion of Korea became impossible, hampering America’s military effectiveness in trying to negotiate a cease-fire. By late 1950 (there had been no dramatic victory at Inchon) the cause was lost, and Korea became a united country under Kim Il Sung. When the occupation ended, America found itself in a very perilous situation in the power struggles in Asia. Congress, fed up with Japan’s lack of loyalty, cut off any discussion of favorable trade terms with Japan. Japan had no choice but to look to Russia, not the United States, as its main trading partner. Other nations in Southeast Asia soon followed suit.

  MacArthur made sure this did not happen.

  17

  “Where’s Ishii?”

  THE FIRST QUESTION MacArthur asked after landing at Atsugi was: “Where’s Ishii?”

  Nobody had any idea where Ishii was. He was nowhere to be found.

  Ishii was Dr. Shiro Ishii, the founder and director of Japan’s “secret of secrets”—Unit 731—a massive top-secret operation conducting research in biological weapons (BW). Only a handful of people in the American government knew about Japan’s potential weapons of mass destruction, which they kept hidden from the American public lest it cause widespread panic. Already Japan, in one of the most daring military stunts ever attempted, had unleashed a fleet of a hundred anthrax-carrying balloons that floated with the winds across the Pacific and landed in California and Oregon. Fortunately most of the anthrax spores had died en route, but the War Department was beside itself worrying what might come next. Countries in the throes of defeat do desperate things, which is another of the reasons President Truman was anxious to end the war quickly with the atom bomb.

  The first inkling the American public had that there was a BW war came the day after the Missouri signing. On the front page of the New York Times, beneath the huge story about the surrender, was an article headed “Enemy Tortured Dying Americans with Sadist Medical ‘Experiments.’ ” The article revealed that American prisoners in a Tokyo hospital had been used as guinea pigs for “fantastic experiments recalling the sorcery and sadism of the Middle Ages.” Medical research conducted by the hospital included injecting Americans with a mixture of acid and dried blood plasma from Red Cross supplies, exposing patients to malignant types of malaria, and observing how long it took for patients to die without proper drugs.

  In Germany among the most diabolical of the Nazis was the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who conducted experiments on live prisoners and quickly vanished before the surrender, now presumably hiding in Argentina. MacArthur would not countenance anything of the kind under his watch, he said. He wanted this monster Ishii, the Japanese Mengele, and he wanted him before the Russians got their hands on him.

  Ishii was the most evil man in Japan—and potentially one of the most useful. MacArthur’s job was to capture him alive and get him to talk. This did not mean bringing him to justice in a court of law, and it most definitely did not mean sending him to his maker. Ishii dead was useless, Ishii alive could be priceless.

  America’s cloak-and-dagger war with Japan had begun two years before Pearl Harbor, in New York City on a cold wintry day in November 1939. A team of Japanese researchers paid a visit to what was then the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, requesting stocks of yellow-fever virus. They were turned down, such a virus being on the prohibited list based on the Hague Convention of 1899 and the Geneva Protocol of 1925, banning biological weapons. The visit might have gone unnoticed had it not been for the fact that one of the Ja
panese researchers then foolishly tried more direct measures. In the institute’s parking lot he offered one of the American scientists a very substantial bribe, and when that didn’t work, he tripled the amount of money and threatened physical harm. The American, frightened out of his wits, ran back to the institute, which immediately reported the incident to the U.S. surgeon general and the War Department.

  For years the United States had been following the progress in Japan of what is known as military medicine. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, an American army doctor, Louis Seaman, had been granted the privileges of a foreign military attaché and accompanied the Japanese troops in Manchuria. After the war he published a book in which he noted that the American fatalities in the Mexican War and the Civil War had been due 25 percent to bullets and 75 percent to disease, and that Japan had made remarkable strides in ensuring good health for its soldiers in the war with Russia, suffering only 18 percent of its fatalities from disease. Defensive hygiene and health had become an important, previously overlooked military tool.

  Another American who noticed this development was Douglas MacArthur. In his visit to Japan with his father in 1905, when they witnessed an army general issue a command in the name of the emperor—the Voice of the Crane—that soldiers take their pills, the subject was military medicine.