Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  A third was “the deterioration of the morale of the occupiers themselves,” as the disease of power infiltrated their ranks and bred “a sort of race superiority”—as had happened to the Japanese themselves in China, Manchuria, and the rest of their former empire.2

  MacArthur was determined not to let that happen to Americans in postwar Japan. Of course some degree of racial tension was always present during the American occupation. Given the racist overtones of much anti-Japanese propaganda during the war, which had portrayed the Japanese as virtually subhuman “yellow monkeys,” MacArthur’s GIs were not inclined to greet the Japanese as their racial equals—especially when Japanese atrocities committed on the battlefield, as well as on POWs and civilians alike, seemed proof that this was a people lacking in basic human feelings.

  Thanks to his father, MacArthur felt no such sense of race superiority. A sense of cultural superiority, however, was another matter. What he saw of traditional Japan was a culture distorted by primitive superstition, pernicious myths such as the divinity of the emperor, and moral values that discounted human feeling and compassion and celebrated violence over peace.

  Here MacArthur firmly believed that part of his mission was to reshape Japanese culture toward a greater respect for ordinary human life, for the dignity of the individual, and for basic human rights. To this end, he hoped to encourage the spread of Christianity among Japan’s population, “to fill the spiritual vacuum left in Japanese life by collapse of their past faith.” In his mind, this development was the spiritual complement to the resurrection of material life in a broken Japan.

  In sum, he would publicly announce on the second anniversary of V-J Day, “The opportunity here afforded to bring to a race, long stunted by ancient concepts of mythological teaching, the refreshing uplift of enlightenment and truth and reality, with practical demonstrations of Christian ideals, is of deep and universal significance.” It was a mission that MacArthur at least took deeply seriously, and it was why he insisted many times that the most important principles he used for creating “a Japan reoriented to peace, security, and justice” were those of the Sermon on the Mount.

  In facing the weakness of past armed occupations, MacArthur wanted to avoid above all the tendency to centralize authority rather than relying on local powers and the principle of self-help. “If any occupation lasts too long,” he noted, “one party becomes slaves and the other masters.” The study of history had convinced him that the careers of Napoleon, Alexander, and Caesar had all suffered serious setbacks because of foreign occupations. He was not going to make the same mistake. He fully intended that acting as Japan’s supreme master would not mark the end of his career and reputation, but the culmination of it.

  —

  “Sometimes my whole staff was lined up against me,” he wrote years later in his memoirs. “But I knew what I was doing….My doubts were to be my best safeguard, my fears my greatest strength.”3 So was an unspoken hope of where success in Japan could lead: possibly even to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the White House itself.

  Whatever later detractors may say—and their criticisms are many and often penetrating—one undeniable fact about MacArthur’s years in Japan remains. He is still the one occupier of a foreign country in modern history, to emerge with his reputation enhanced rather than diminished.

  —

  Certainly he was undeterred by the fact that this was by far the largest administrative task the U.S. Army had ever undertaken.

  He and his staff loved nothing more than hashing out a large bureaucratic logistics challenge, especially one involving lots of unknown factors, and this was no exception. They first worked out the broad outlines of what they, and the authorities in Washington, wanted to achieve. From there it was just a matter of figuring out how the vast military machinery he had put together to win the war would turn itself to democratizing and transforming the country of Japan.

  MacArthur’s solution was straightforward, if not exactly simple. It was to transfer most of the functions formerly performed by AFPAC directly into the administration structure of SCAP. On October 2 AFPAC’s military government formally dissolved and GHQ, SCAP took its place. But little had changed. The standard sections of military command—G1, G2, G3, and G4—simply blossomed into the channels through which Mac’s authority became enforced in Japan. Every original AFPAC division chief became his SCAP counterpart.4

  The staff was in many cases the same as the group who had steered MacArthur to victory in the Philippines, with one major exception.

  Richard Sutherland, now a lieutenant general, formally stepped down in the autumn of 1945. MacArthur had recalled him from vacation in Washington to help organize the surrender ceremony on the Missouri. Afterward he had finished his vacation in Australia, and returned to Tokyo expecting some kind of assignment. MacArthur gave him nothing. The bond of trust that had existed between them had been shattered forever by what MacArthur saw as Sutherland’s poor judgment and bad faith over the Clark incident.

  Finally Sutherland, who suffered from severe hypertension, went to see MacArthur to tell him he wanted to be relieved as chief of staff so he could return stateside. MacArthur said he thought that was a good idea. Sutherland saluted and left, without so much as a thank-you from his old boss.5

  One of the closest and most productive working relationships of the Second World War was over. On the fifty-hour flight from Tokyo back to Washington, Sutherland complained bitterly about his treatment at the hands of the supreme commander. “Nothing I could do seemed totally to please him,” he kept saying. Rhoades, one of the very few on MacArthur’s staff who actually liked the crusty, caustic Sutherland, listened politely as Sutherland voiced his disappointment mile after mile, hour after hour.

  Sutherland also said that MacArthur had never explained why he had fallen into disgrace—although both he and Rhoades knew why. Sutherland ended up, Rhoades wrote later, “a bitter and disappointed soldier.” He lived until 1966 without ever mending the relationship with his former chief—the only one of the old Bataan Gang who never spoke to MacArthur again.6

  Sutherland’s place as chief of staff was taken for the next four years by Richard Marshall, MacArthur’s old G-1, but the man who would take Sutherland’s place as MacArthur’s chief confidant—alter ego, almost—was Brigadier General Courtney Whitney. They had known each since Manila days in the thirties when Whitney was a prosperous attorney; then he had handled liaison with guerrilla groups in the Philippines and civil affairs in post-liberation Manila.

  Like Sutherland, Whitney was aloof and abrasive; like Sutherland, he had a gift for making enemies. “A stuffed pig with a mustache,” was how one detractor described him, “with a pointed nose and small eyes.”7 But MacArthur trusted him implicitly. Whitney would head up SCAP’s Government Section starting in December, and transform it into the most important bureaucratic division of the occupation—in fact, into the equivalent of the Constitutional Convention of Japan.

  One old Bataan Gang member who did not leave—although some may have wished he had—was Charles Willoughby, now Major General Willoughby. He remained MacArthur’s G-2 or head of military intelligence, but in May 1946 he persuaded his boss to give him control over the Civil Intelligence Section, as well.

  He would become MacArthur’s J. Edgar Hoover—“my lovable fascist,” MacArthur would disarmingly tell visitors—devoted not just to running down Japanese war criminals, occupation profiteers, and ex–military intelligence officers (some of whom he incorporated into G-2) but also to spying on domestic Communist groups and Communist sympathizers.

  Sometimes described as “the second most powerful man in Japan,” Willoughby also occasionally dabbled in Japanese politics by undercutting politicians through leaks regarding corruption or subversive activities—at one point even allegedly authorizing the kidnapping of a Communist intellectual, Kaji Wataru.8 Willoughby’s domestic surveillance efforts don’t win him many plaudits from liberal-minded historians, American or Japane
se. But they kept MacArthur closely informed of how those who were his enemies, particularly on the Japanese left, were reacting to his policies—and kept Communist-led unions and other groups from opening a possible subversive fifth column with the outbreak of war in Korea.

  William Marquat, now also a major general, took over the Economic and Scientific Section of SCAP, which oversaw sensitive matters such as exports and imports, labor unions, and cartels and antitrust, including the vast Japanese industrial corporations, or zaibatsu, which MacArthur was dedicated to breaking up. Steve Chamberlin remained on as G-3, and Hugh Casey as chief engineer officer. Spencer Akin remained chief signal officer, including monitoring other people’s signals, and was head of SCAP’s Civil Communication Section. LeGrande Diller was still head of public relations, and a place was even found for Sid Huff to stay on—while MacArthur’s chief advisor on Japan, Bonner Fellers, served as military secretary of GHQ.

  Probably the busiest section at GHQ, at least in the early days of the occupation, was Public Health and Welfare, headed by Colonel Crawford F. Sams (who because of his indefatigable efforts to stamp out infectious diseases across the islands became known to the Japanese as Doctor Lice).9 But by far the most important was Whitney’s Government Section, which oversaw virtually every major political reform in Japan until the formal end of occupation in 1951.

  Whitney was soon joined by Charles Kades, a liberal New Dealer whose views on what to do about Japan, far from alienating MacArthur, steadily won his support and respect. The Whitney-Kades team was exactly the balance MacArthur was looking for, as they all embarked on the most extraordinary bureaucratic adventure of the twentieth century, transforming a proud but defeated Asian nation with ancient feudal roots into a modern functioning democracy—in MacArthur’s words, turning Japan into “the world’s greatest laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of a people from totalitarian military rule and for the liberalization of government from within.”10

  No expert, including experts on Japan, thought they would succeed. Some still insist they failed, and that too much of Japan’s rigid social system and traditional elitist culture survived the American occupation. But without doubt the emergence of modern Japan would have been impossible without them—and without MacArthur driving hard at the helm. In the words of one distinguished Japanese historian, “in a profound and basic way, it set the course of Japanese history in the second half of the twentieth century.”11

  Washington did not make the job easy. As during the war, there was a constant frustrating tug-of-war, not with the Joint Chiefs this time but with the State Department and various other government agencies trying to oversee policy in Japan, at first because MacArthur’s policies seemed too radical, especially regarding Japan’s military, but later because they were not radical enough.

  MacArthur thoroughly believed the problem was that the administration, including Secretary of State Marshall and his deputy Dean Acheson, saw everything that happened in Asia through a Eurocentric lens. They seemed too focused on what was happening in Germany and Europe; Marshall and his aides, MacArthur warned one visitor, “paid heed” only to “Wall Street whose main holdings were in Europe.”12 From his desk in the Dai-ichi building he would always feel that the Truman men treated Asia and Asians with a mixture of condescension and cultural chauvinism—and therefore treated him in much the same way.

  In the end, however, MacArthur managed to prevail in virtually every major dispute by a combination of persuasion, guile, sheer willpower, and outright bullying. He had key advantages. He was, after all, the man on the scene, with the authority to override directives he disagreed with—or ignore those he couldn’t override. He was a leading figure in the opposite political party, the Republicans, who could summon allies on the Hill and even a former president, Herbert Hoover, when he needed them. MacArthur was a cherished hero at home, the most widely recognized victor of World War Two. He would soon be a cherished hero in Japan as well.

  So although some critics would later claim that MacArthur’s major changes were all dictated from Washington and he was only following orders, the fact remains that he left his own personal stamp on everything that happened, from votes for women to a new Japanese constitution—and did it in ways that made Jean’s nickname for him, Sir Boss, after the Mark Twain character who single-handedly tries to transform a medieval society into a modern industrial one, ironically appropriate.

  —

  There were, however, two other people who were indispensable to the process.

  The first was Bonner Fellers, former planning section chief for G-3 for SWPA, and then MacArthur’s military secretary and chief of his psychological warfare group. One of his key duties there was figuring out how to convince more Japanese soldiers to surrender rather than fight to the death. Fellers had studied Japan while at Leavenworth’s Command and General Staff School from 1933 to 1934, with a particular focus on the Japanese soldier’s fanatical devotion to the emperor even to the point of suicide. Fellers had even predicted the emergence of kamikaze tactics.

  Yet he also deplored the American habit during the war, after long bitter experience, of refusing to take Japanese prisoners who all too often would use a white flag to draw Americans out and then open fire, or would turn out to have a grenade hidden in their underwear.

  Taking prisoners was a matter of breaking down that fanatical devotion, Fellers believed, by risking compassion, and as “a matter of national honor we make good our word” when urging Japanese to surrender.13 Now, after the war, it was also Fellers who convinced MacArthur that the emperor should not only be retained but be the central pivot for the reform of Japanese society.

  “As Emperor and acknowledged head of state,” Fellers wrote frankly, “Hirohito cannot escape war guilt.” Still, “the hanging of the Emperor to [the Japanese] would be comparable to the crucifixion of Christ….But the mystic hold [that] the Emperor has on his people and the spiritual strength of the Shinto faith properly directed need not be dangerous. The Emperor can be made a force for good and peace…Once the Tokyo gangster militarists are dead, once the armed forces are destroyed, and the liberal government formed under the Emperor, the Japanese people—sadder, fewer, and wiser—can begin the reorientation of their lives”—under American leadership and based on American values.14

  MacArthur agreed. His desire to turn Japan into a laboratory of democracy and liberty needed a powerful ally on the scene, and from first to last he would work to make Hirohito his ally in that process.

  The other key figure was new to the MacArthur team. William Sebald had been a corporate lawyer working in Japan in the twenties before he entered the United States Foreign Service, and in 1945 was made the State Department’s point man in Tokyo in dealing with Japan—and with MacArthur. Although often ignored in most accounts of the occupation, Sebald’s relationship with MacArthur and their almost daily conversations, with MacArthur talking and Sebald listening, became one of the most important points of coordination, and reduction of friction, between SCAP and Washington. Indeed, very often plans that MacArthur had “thought out loud” with Sebald in his office would appear later as implementable policy in official pronouncements.

  Sebald knew that MacArthur viewed Washington’s interference as ignorant and unwarranted. MacArthur treated the State Department as a foreign, even hostile entity—and the Far Eastern Commission, with its Russian and British members, even more so. Sebald also understood that MacArthur saw himself as simultaneously moving forward on the transformation and fighting a bitter rear-guard action against any dilution of his authority. “Never before in the history of the United States,” Sebald wrote of the first months of occupation, “had such enormous and absolute power been placed in the hands of a single individual.” It served as a great burden but also a great temptation to abuse. Yet the system worked well, Sebald later acknowledged, thanks to “the personality, experience, assurance, image, and—for lack of a better word—the wizardry of MacArthur.”15

&
nbsp; But even MacArthur had the sense to know that although he could beat Washington into submission, and even the emperor and his advisors, he could not bend the Japanese people themselves to his will. Even in abject defeat, they were going to exert their power to shape events and deflect any changes that cut too much against the Japanese cultural grain. Part of MacArthur’s success over the next six years was his recognition of that reality—and of the limits, as well as the possibilities, of reform.

  From the start, however, the biggest problem he faced was simply keeping the Japanese alive.

  Food shortages had already begun to appear before Pearl Harbor, and by the time of surrender most Japanese were seriously undernourished. Lack of food had disrupted the war effort, pulled apart the social and cultural fabric (in Osaka Prefecture in 1944 almost half of all “economic crimes” involved the theft of food). Wheat and even rice had become virtually nonexistent and the imperial government had been forced to do things like encourage people to use acorns, tree bark, and sawdust as substitutes. One schoolgirl remembered thinking, when she heard the emperor’s surrender broadcast on August 15, 1945, that the end of the war would mean she wouldn’t have to go to the river every night to catch frogs for the family supper.16

  Now with the war over but most of Japan’s merchant marine sunk by Allied submarines, the possibility of making up the difference by means of imports from its former empire (one out of every three sacks of rice the Japanese ate had to be imported) looked alarmingly dim. Hirohito’s minister of agriculture warned him on the day of surrender that there were barely three days’ worth of rice mixed with soybeans left in Tokyo. In the three months after the surrender there were more than a thousand deaths from malnutrition. The minister of finance predicted that another ten million would die if food was not forthcoming.17

  It was MacArthur who saved the situation. He set up army food kitchens to feed hundreds of thousands of Japanese. He also seized some 3.5 million tons of food stockpiled by the U.S. Army in the Pacific, and shipped it all to Japan to see the country through the winter.