As usual, inter-service rivalry brought out the least attractive traits in everyone. Hap Arnold noted in his diary that “Nimitz would not agree to having Kenney bomb ships or operate ten miles offshore; and he insisted the Navy must have first priority rights in the Japanese Inland Sea. “ Forrestal wrote in his diary that MacArthur felt that “Nimitz is his friend and good pal. . . . But he suspects that that regard is not reciprocated.” MacArthur darkly told Eichelberger that the “Navy’s object is to control all overseas positions after the war, using the Army as a sort of home guard.” He said the navy wanted to defeat the Japanese without the army’s help—as though that were possible—and he even believed that the editors of the army’s Infantry Journal were betraying him, “giving out what amounts to propaganda for the Navy.” Everyone, in short, was still against MacArthur. “Washington would continue a very real and devastating second front for him,” wrote Spike Hunt. But Nimitz, steely in his quiet way, refused to be intimidated. Forrestal noted that “he finally authorized his representative to lay down the law . . . the admiral . . . would not surrender to the General.”119
Meanwhile Hirohito’s generals, grimly preparing for the invasion, had not abandoned hope of saving their homeland. Although a few strategic islands had been lost, they told each other, most of their conquests, including the Chinese heartland, were firmly in their hands, and the bulk of their army was undefeated. Even now they could scarcely believe that any foe would have the audacity to attempt landings in Japan itself. Allied troops, they boasted, would face the fiercest resistance in history. Over ten thousand kamikaze planes were readied for “Ketsu-Go,” Operation Decision. Behind the beaches, enormous connecting underground caves had been stocked with caches of food and thousands of tons of ammunition. Manning the nation’s ground defenses were 2,350,000 regular soldiers, 250,000 garrison troops, and 32,000,000 civilian militiamen—a total of 34,600,000, more than the combined armies of the United States, Great Britain, and Nazi Germany. All males aged fifteen to sixty, and all females aged seventeen to forty-five, had been conscripted. Their weapons included ancient bronze cannon, muzzle-loading muskets, bamboo spears, and bows and arrows. Even little children had been trained to strap explosives around their waists, roll under tank treads, and blow themselves up. They were called “Sherman carpets. ”
This was the enemy the Pentagon had learned to fear and hate—a country of fanatics dedicated to hara-kiri, determined to slay as many invaders as possible as they went down fighting. But there was another Japan, and MacArthur was one of the few Americans who suspected its existence. He kept urging the Pentagon and the State Department to be alert for conciliatory gestures. Kenney notes that the General predicted that “the break would come from Tokyo, not from the Japanese army. . . . When I was in Washington in March 1945 I repeated MacArthur’s ideas, but everyone I talked to in the War Department and even among the Air crowd disagreed. The consensus was that Japan would hold out possibly for another two years.” Nevertheless, the General was right. A dovish coalition was forming in the Japanese capital, and it was headed by Hirohito himself, who had concluded in the spring of 1945 that a negotiated peace was the only way to end his nation’s agony. Beginning in early May a six-man council of Japanese diplomats explored ways to accommodate the Allies. Some, like Koichi Kido, lord keeper of the privy seal, had known for over a year that the war was lost. Others had been converted by an eleventh-hour delegation of Japanese industrialists, among them Ryozo Asano, who recalls that the delegates informed top military officials that “our production was finished. We could produce war materials for only a few days more. Many of our factories had been bombed out of existence. Our workers had fled to the hills. But worst of all, we had no raw materials.”120
In late May Japanese envoys in Moscow, which was still neutral in the Pacific then, made overtures toward an armistice. Harry Hopkins cabled Truman from there that “Japan is doomed and the Japanese know it” and that “peace feelers are being put out by certain elements in Japan.” Had Roosevelt been alive, his fine political antennae might have sensed the possibilities here. But Truman, new in office and less flexible in diplomacy, was swayed by such advisers as Dean Acheson, Archibald MacLeish, and Hopkins himself, who believed that negotiations were pointless; that unless Hirohito was unthroned, the war would have been in vain. The upshot was the Potsdam declaration in July, demanding that Japan surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction.” MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General’s advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary.121
In an implacable mood, then, successive versions of “Downfall,” the code word for the invasion of Dai Nippon, were drafted in Washington and revised in Manila. All of them assumed the worst: that Russian support would be unavailable, that B-29 raids and a naval blockade of Dai Nippon would not be decisive, and that the Manhattan Project (of whose existence MacArthur and Nimitz were unaware until late July) would fail to produce practical nuclear fission devices. Germany’s surrender on May 7, however, guaranteed masses of veteran Allied infantrymen.* Thirty divisions were on their way to the Philippines from the ETO. In June there were 1,400,000 GIs ready to stage from the archipelago; another 1,000,000 were expected by December. Courtney Hodges, commander of the U. S. First Army, had already arrived in Manila, but MacArthur still preferred his own field commanders. “Downfall” would begin with “Operation Olympic,” a frontal assault on Kyushu by 766,700 Allied troops under Krueger on November 1, 1945, whose purpose would be to secure, in the General’s words, “airfields to cover the main assault on Honshu.” The second phase, “Operation Coronet,” the landing on Honshu, would follow on March 1, 1946. He himself, probably with Eichelberger as his chief of staff, would lead that.122
He had no illusions about the savagery that lay ahead—he told Stimson that Downfall would “cost over a million casualties to American forces alone”—but he was confident that with the tanks from Europe he could outmaneuver the defenders on the great Kanto Plain before Tokyo. Whether he would be as adroit with Eisenhower’s generals, not to mention Ike himself, was another matter. Granting an interview to Bert Andrews of the New York Herald Tribune, he said that the ETO commanders had made “every mistake that supposedly intelligent men could make,” that “the North African operation was absolutely useless,” that “the European strategy was to hammer stupidly against the enemy’s strongest points,” and that if he had been given “just a portion of the force” sent to North Africa in 1942, he “could have retaken the Philippines in three months because at that time the Japanese were not ready.”123
With each passing day the General felt surer that peace was very near. Two weeks before Hiroshima he told Kenney that he believed the enemy would surrender “by September 1 at the latest and perhaps even sooner.” On Sunday, August 5, a courier arrived from Washington with word that an atomic bomb would be dropped on an industrial area south of Tokyo the following day. On Monday, before news of the first nuclear holocaust had reached him, he called an off-the-record press briefing at Manila City Hall. According to the notes of James J. Halsema of the Manila Daily Bulletin, who was there, the General predicted that “the war may end sooner than some think”; Russian participation in the struggle against Nippon, he said, was “welcome.” On Wednesday the Soviet Union repudiated its treaties with Japan and invaded Manchuria, and on Thursday the second atomic bomb devastated Nagasaki. That afternoon MacArthur issued a statement: “I am delighted at the Russian declaration of war against Japan. This will make possible a great pincer movement which cannot fail to end in the destruction of the enemy. In Europe, Russia was on the eastern front, the Allies on the we
st. Now the Allies are on the east and Russia on the west, but the result will be the same. ”
Three days later President Truman suspended B-29 raids on Japan; three days after that, on Wednesday, August 15, Hirohito ordered an end to all hostilities at 4:00 P.M. Tokyo time, telling his people that they must “endure the unendurable and suffer the insufferable.” Truman, with the approval of Clement Attlee, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek, appointed MacArthur Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). Eichelberger wrote home: “First, monkeys will come to Manila; . . . second, MacArthur will meet the Japs on a battleship off Bataan and there he and certain representatives of the Allied powers will sign the peace treaty.” In a revealing moment of jubilance, the General told Eichelberger: “They haven’t gotten my scalp yet, Bob!”124
So tremendous a passage of events was bound to leave turbulence in its wake on both sides. MacArthur’s first order—that no local surrenders could be accepted elsewhere in Asia until after his ceremony on the battleship Missouri—led to Communist takeovers in parts of China and Java. Then V. M. Molotov told Averell Harriman in Moscow that on the strength of the Red Army’s few days in the Pacific war, MacArthur should accept a Russian marshal as a full partner in presiding over the surrender ceremony and, later, in ruling over Tokyo. Harriman said it was “unthinkable that the Supreme Commander should be anyone other than an American,” and passed the piece of impertinence along to Washington, where, Truman writes in his memoirs, “I made up my mind that General MacArthur would be given complete command and control after victory in Japan. We were not going to be disturbed by Russian tactics in the Pacific.”125
The situation in the defeated capital was, as might be expected, more chaotic. Hirohito was so sacred a figure that his subjects had never even heard his voice. Now he recorded a kodo sempu (dissemination of the royal way) broadcast, informing them of the empire’s capitulation. Some senior officers were committing seppuku with their little disemboweling knives, while younger hotheads, convincing one another that the record of the imperial rescript must be a fake, tried to destroy it. They fought their way into the emperor’s palace, and thirty-two were killed before they were turned back. To many of them, a warrior’s death, even at the hands of their countrymen, seemed preferable to the shame and disgrace of surrender. At Atsu-gi air base, fifteen miles west of Yokohama, the commanding officer told his pilots that capitulation would be treason. “Join me in destroying the enemy!” he cried, and they shouted back, “Banzai!”126
Their revulsion may be puzzling now, but in the light of the propaganda they had been fed for four years, it is less so. They believed that Americans were hairy barbarians who would treat the Japanese as Admiral Iwabuchi’s sailors and marines had treated the Filipinos in Manila. Like all vanquished soldiers in all wars, they were worried about their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. Tokyo broadcasts urged women to flee into the hills if possible; if not, they should not venture abroad after dark, and should leave watches and other valuables at home when they did go out. They were told to wear loose-fitting clothing, to try to look unattractive, and to refrain from such provocative acts as smoking or smiling at GIs. Female employees at the Nakajima Aircraft Company, the Kanto Kyogo Company, and other plants, were given cyanide capsules to swallow if rapists threw them to the ground.
MacArthur was interested in Japanese women, but in a very different context. One of his first acts, he told Bonner Fellers, would be to give women the vote. “The Japanese men wont like it,” said Fellers, and indeed, as events would prove, many of them regarded it as worse than sexual assault. The General said, “I don’t care. I want to discredit the military. Women don’t like war.” It was part of his enigmatic temperament that although he could be ungenerous toward American admirals and uncivil toward his superiors in Washington, he was an imaginative, magnanimous conqueror. He intended, he said, to “use the instrumentality of the Japanese government to implement the occupation.” Sitting in front of a Quonset hut and puffing on his pipe, he told an aide that woman suffrage was only one point in his seven-point plan for postwar Japan. The others were disarming Japanese soldiers, sending them home, dismantling war industry, holding free elections, encouraging the formation of labor unions, and opening all schools with no check on instruction except the elimination of military indoctrination and the addition of courses in civics.127
He had already thought it all through, which was a good thing, because he had little time for reflection now. These were among the most hectic days in his life. He was receiving Allied figures like England’s Mountbatten and Russia’s Lieutenant General Kuzma N. Derevyanko, cabling Truman (“I am deeply grateful for the confidence you have so generously bestowed upon me in my appointment as Supreme Commander’), and even addressing a crowd of GIs who appeared below his second-story office window to cheer him—evidence that their bitterness toward him had been, at least temporarily, forgotten. Struggling to master his emotions, he slowly said to them, “I hope from the bottom of my heart that this is the end of the war. If it is, it is largely due to your own efforts. Very soon, I hope, we will all be going home.”128
There was, even then, a lurking suspicion that the Nipponese might be baiting a trap. The treachery at Pearl Harbor could not be forgotten, and when Tokyo radioed its understandable anxiety over die-hard Japanese officers who might disobey Hirohito and sabotage the surrender, they received little sympathy from the victors. The General curtly told them to send him a sixteen-man delegation to discuss the coming ceremony of capitulation. They were instructed to use the password “Bataan.” They replied that they would prefer to use the letters “JNP.” The firm directive was repeated; it must be “Bataan.” An interlude of opera bouffe followed. No one in Japan wanted to serve on the delegation. Every time sixteen officers and officials assembled, one of them would run away. Finally they took off on Sunday, August 19, in two Mitsubishi bombers, the type Allies called “Bettys,” which, on MacArthur’s further instructions, had been painted white and marked with green crosses. A dozen U.S. aircraft challenged them. The Japanese pilots flashed the signal “Bataan,” received the reply, “We are Bataan’s watchdog. Follow us,” and were escorted to Ie Shima, a small island off the coast of Okinawa, where they boarded a C-54 for Manila, some 750 miles to the south.129
MacArthur was too shrewd an Orientalist to show himself to the sixteen Japanese. He already considered himself Hirohito’s successor, and, to do him credit, he knew that they would so regard him. Therefore he remained aloof while they were met by Charles Willoughby. As Katsuo Ozaki of the Foreign Office descended the ramp at Nichols Field he heard so many cameras clicking that it seemed to him “like machine guns fired at strange animals. ” The scene was, in fact, photogenic; there were the tiny Japanese, and there was hulking Willoughby, a man who looked like, and sometimes thought like, Hermann Göring. He hustled the Japanese into cars, just in time; enraged Filipinos had begun to throw rocks at them. During the ride to Manila, Willoughby asked a Nipponese general, Torashiro Kawabe, what language he preferred. “German,” was the answer, and since German was Willoughby’s native tongue, they were soon jabbering away with unexpected ease. At the Rosario Apartments, a two-story building down the street from the ruins of the Manila Hotel, Sutherland and the rest of the General’s staff awaited them. There were two awkward moments. The Americans wanted to land at Atsugi field in four days. The Japanese, recoiling, disclosed that Atsugi, the kamikaze training field, was a hotbed of revolt against the cease-fire. Sutherland gave them five days’ grace to get the situation under control, but he wouldn’t switch to another airport. Then the Nipponese were shown a draft of the surrender document. The Japanese version opened, “I, Hirohito, Emperor of Japan,” using the pronoun “watakushi” for “I.” They were horrified; the emperor always referred to himself as “Chin” — the royal “we.” Colonel Sidney Mashbir, MacArthur’s chief interpreter, made the change. Afterward he explained it to the General, who put an arm around his shoulder and said, “Mashbir,
you handled that exactly right. I have no desire whatever to debase him in the eyes of his own people.”130
Japan, the only major power whose soil had never been sullied by the boot of an enemy soldier, lost that distinction at dawn on Tuesday, August 28, when Colonel Charles Tench, a member of MacArthur’s staff, stepped from a C-47 and set foot on Atsugi’s bomb-pocked runway. Instantly a mob of howling Japanese headed for him. He was reaching for his weapon when they braked to a halt, bowed, smiled, and offered him a cup of orangeade. He declined, and one of them drained it to show that it wasn’t toxic. Tench radioed Manila, “No hostile action encountered,” but he was still nervous. So was every officer in MacArthur’s command except MacArthur himself. The General assured those around him in Manila’s City Hall that “the emperor has told them to lay down their arms, and he is divine.” Kenney thought he saw a flaw in the argument. He said, “Divinities aren’t supposed to lose wars.” MacArthur didn’t reply. Later he called the dispatch of Tench’s small airborne contingent of 150 men “one of the greatest gambles in history,” but at the time he preserved an air of inscrutable silence. The fact is that he didn’t know what was going to happen. Neither did anyone else, including the Japanese.131
Yoshio Kodama recalls that at the news of the surrender, “some people were dumb-struck into senselessness, others were roused to overpowering indignation. But what man, born a Japanese, could oppose the words of the Emperor, which had been spoken in tears? The entire nation in solemnity, tears brimming in their hearts, submitted to the command to surrender.” That was an overstatement. Even Kodama concedes that there was a “fractional minority” which refused to comply. Fractional they were, but they were also noisy and dangerous. Teams of youths wearing white bands around their heads and calling themselves the Sonno Joi Gigun (the Righteous Group for Upholding Imperial Rule and Driving Out Foreigners) roamed Tokyo and its twin city of Yokohama, shouting “Tenno heika banzai!” three times and seeking honorable deaths. They occupied the Yoyogi parade ground and Atago Hill, near the American embassy; they laid siege to the home of Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki and set fire to the residences of two senior statesmen. One group surrounded the palace, tried to disarm its police guard, and murdered the commanding general of the Imperial Guard Division before withdrawing. The NHK radio station at Kawaguchi was seized, and there were scattered attacks on post offices, power stations, and newspaper offices. According to Japanese documents, a group of them were a stone’s throw from Colonel Tench’s parked C-47.
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