American Caesar

by William Manchester

  Naturally, the Allies were in a jolly mood. Holland’s C.E.L. Helfrich, who had survived the desperate Battle of the Java Sea in 1942, was joking with Richmond Kelly Turner, whose amphibious force had put the marines ashore at Guadalcanal; Eichelberger was in an animated conversation with Kenney, Stilwell, and Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, the airman. It was the unenviable task of Commander Horace Bird, the Missouri’s gunnery officer, to silence all this brass before MacArthur and Nimitz came on deck. He despaired of getting their attention until, in exasperation, he cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled: “Attention, all hands!” That quieted them, but they couldn’t help smiling. Then Bird informed them that the destroyer Lansdowne was approaching with the eleven-man Nipponese delegation. Teddy White noted a swift change in the expressions of the Allied officers: “Stilwell bristled like a dog at the sight of an enemy. Spaatz’s chiseled face lines were sharp in contempt. Kenney curved his lips in a visible sneer.”147

  The emotions of the Japanese were almost indescribable. At 5:00 A.M. they had assembled in the half-burned official residence of the new prime minister, Prince Toshihiko Higashikuni. The diplomats, led by Shigemitsu, who had been crippled years ago by a terrorist’s bomb in Shanghai and limped on a wooden leg, wore tall silk hats, ascots, and cutaways. The ranking soldier was the chief of the imperial general staff, Yoshijiro Umezu, “his chest covered with ribbons and hung with gold braid,” White would write, “his eyes blank and unseeing.” Umezu had at first refused to participate in the surrender ceremony; Hirohito had brought him round with a personal appeal. Even the emperor had been unable to persuade Admiral Toyoda to attend, however. Toyoda had ordered his operations officer, Sadatoshi To-mioka, to take his place: “You lost the war,” he told him, “so you go.” Tomioka obeyed, but vowed to commit seppuku upon his return.148

  Before they left for Yokohama, the officers unbuckled their sabers and flags were removed from the hoods of the battered cars of their motorcade. “We had thus furled the banner and ungirt the sword,” wrote Kase in his subsequent account. “Diplomats without flag and soldiers without sword—sullen and silent we continued the journey until we reached the quay.” The first vessel they saw was the Japanese destroyer Hatsuzabura, with her three five-inch guns depressed, as though bowing. Then they mounted the pier and beheld the gleaming Allied armada, the greatest ever assembled, “lines on lines of gray battleships,” a Japanese wrote afterward, “. . . anchored in majestic array. This was the mighty pageant of the Allied navies that so lately belched forth their crashing battle, now holding in their swift thunder and floating like calm sea birds on the subjugated waters. ”

  At 8:55 A.M. the delegation reached the Missouri. Shigemitsu was first up the ladder, leaning heavily on his walking stick. He was struggling to mount the steps; Commander Bird stepped down and extended his hand; the foreign minister, his face wooden, shook it off and then briefly accepted it. An American newspaperman wrote that the waiting Allied commanders watched the foreign minister’s plight “with savage satisfaction.” Bird showed the Japanese where to stand, in four ranks. Kase felt “subjected to the torture of the pillory. A million eyes seemed to beat on us with the million shafts of a rattling storm of arrows barbed with fire. I felt their keenness sink into my body with a sharp physical pain. Never have I realized that the glance of glaring eyes could hurt so much. We waited . . . standing in the public gaze like penitent boys awaiting the dreaded schoolmaster. I tried to preserve the dignity of defeat but it was difficult and every minute contained ages.” Actually only four minutes passed before the chaplain’s invocation and the recorded playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” over the ship’s public address system. Then MacArthur appeared, walking briskly between Nimitz and Halsey, whose flagship this was. The two admirals peeled off to take their places in the U, and the General stepped straight to the microphone. He later wrote that he had “received no instructions as to what to say or what to do. I was on my own, standing on the quarterdeck with only God and my own conscience to guide me.” His chest, unlike those of the other officers, was bare of medals. A U.S. sailor whispered: “Look at Mac. Ain’t he got no ribbons?” The gob beside him whispered back: “If he wore them, they’d go clear over his shoulder.”149

  His stance was a portrait of soldierly poise. Only his hand trembled slightly as he held a single sheet of paper before him and said: “We are gathered here, representative of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored.” It would, he continued, be inappropriate to discuss here “different ideals and ideologies” or to meet “in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred. “ Instead, both the conquerors and the conquered must rise “to that higher dignity which alone benefits the sacred purposes we are about to serve.” It was his “earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind” that “a better world shall emerge,” one “founded upon faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance and justice.” At the end he said: “As Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, I announce it my firm purpose, in the tradition of the countries I represent, to proceed in the discharge of my responsibilities . . . while taking all necessary dispositions to insure that the terms of surrender are fully, promptly, and faithfully complied with.”150

  Listening to the mellifluous, sonorous voice, Lieutenant General Yatsuji Nagai marveled at MacArthur’s youthful bearing, contrasting it with Umezu’s stooped, senescent appearance. He wondered whether the outcome of the war could account for the difference. Tomioka was struck by the General’s lack of vindictiveness. But the diminutive Kase was enraptured. He thought: “What stirring eloquence and what a noble vision! Here is a victor announcing the verdict to the prostrate enemy. He can exact his pound of flesh if he so chooses. He can impose a humiliating penalty if he so desires. And yet he pleads for freedom, tolerance, and justice. For me, who expected the worst humiliation, this was a complete surprise. I was thrilled beyond words, spellbound, thunderstruck. For the living heroes and dead martyrs of the war this speech was a wreath of undying flowers.” It seemed to Kase that “MacArthur’s words sailed on wings,” that “this narrow quarterdeck was now transformed into an altar of peace.”151

  Two copies of the instrument of capitulation lay on the table, one bound in leather for the Allies, the other, canvas-bound, for the Japanese. As cameras clicked and whirred, the signing now began. The General beckoned to Shigemitsu, who hobbled forward, sat down, and fumbled with his cane, gloves, and hat. Halsey, thinking he was stalling, wanted to slap his face and shout, “Sign, damn you, sign!” but MacArthur, realizing that the man was simply bewildered, said in a voice like a pistol shot, “Sutherland! Show him where to sign!” Next, Umezu, scorning the chair, leaned forward awkwardly and scribbled his name. After the Japanese, it was the turn of the victors. One Japanese, watching the representatives of nine great Allied nations parade to the green baize, could not help wondering “how it was that Japan, a poor country, had had the temerity to wage war against the combination of so many powerful nations. Indeed, it was Japan against the whole world.”152

  Not everything went well in this historic transaction. A drunken Allied delegate, not an American, made rude faces at the Japanese. The Canadian emissary wrote on the wrong line. At one point in the proceedings Carl Mydans, the Life photographer, ran out for a close-up of the erect, severe, solemn MacArthur. (As he was being hustled away, the General winked at him.) These were the only interruptions, however, and at the end of the eighteen-minute ritual MacArthur sat, pulled five fountain pens from his pocket, and affixed his own signature with them. He handed the first to Wainwright; the second, to Percival. The third would go to West Point and the fourth to Annapolis. The last, a cheap, red-barreled affair, belonged to Jean. He used it to write the “Arthur” in his signature. She would save it for their son. Rising at 9:25 A.M., he said in a steely voice, “These proceedings are now closed.” As the Japanese were led away, he put an arm around
Halsey’s shoulders and said, “Bill, where the hell are those airplanes?” As if on signal, a cloud of planes—B-29s and navy fighters—roared across the sky from the south. They joined, Kenney wrote, “in a long sweeping majestic turn as they disappeared toward the mists hiding the sacred mountain of Fujiyama.”153

  In that instant, World War II ended. But MacArthur meant to speak the first words of the peace, too, and had spent most of the night working and reworking them in his spiky handwriting. Now he returned to the microphone for a broadcast to the American people. Jean, listening in Manila, would never forget the vibrancy in his voice as he said: “Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death—the seas bear only commerce—men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world is quietly at peace. The holy mission has been completed. And in reporting this to you, the people, I speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way.” He said, “Men since the beginning of time have sought peace,” but “military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war.” Now “we have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.”154

  Nearly a century earlier, he observed, Matthew Perry had landed here “to bring to Japan an era of enlightenment and progress, by lifting the veil of isolation to the friendship, trade, and commerce of the world. But, alas, the knowledge thereby gained of Western science was forged into an instrument of oppression and human enslavement. Freedom of expression, freedom of action, even freedom of thought were denied through appeal to superstition, and through the application of force. We are committed,” he said, “to see that the Japanese people are liberated from this condition of slavery.” He believed that “the energy of the Japanese race, if properly directed, will enable expansion vertically rather than horizontally. If the talents of the race are turned into constructive channels, the country can lift itself from its present deplorable state into a position of dignity. To the Pacific basin has come the vista of a new emancipated world. Today, freedom is on the offensive, democracy is on the march. Today, in Asia as well as in Europe, unshackled peoples are tasting the full sweetness of liberty, the relief from fear.” He concluded: “And so, my fellow countrymen, today I report to you that your sons and daughters have served you well and faithfully with the calm, deliberate, determined fighting spirit of the American soldier and sailor. . . . Their spiritual strength and power has brought us through to victory. They are homeward bound—take care of them.”155

  A third of a century later Kenney would still regard this as the General’s “greatest speech.” From Yokohama Time correspondent Shelley Mydans cabled, “The best adjective for MacArthur’s attitude toward this peace and the Japanese is ‘Olympian.’ He is thinking in centuries and populations.” But with few exceptions the other officers on the quarterdeck lacked his vision; they had enjoyed the mortification of the Japanese, and that, and the relief that it was all over, had been the extent of their emotional experience. After the General had left, Eichelberger joined a group of admirals for coffee and doughnuts in the wardroom. Some of the talk was shoptalk; they discussed future implications of modern war’s three dimensions—ground, sea, and air. Mostly, however, they were merry. Early in the war Halsey had boasted that after the war he would ride Hirohito’s white horse down the main street of Tokyo, and now, Eichelberger wrote Miss Em, “in Halsey’s cabin is the most beautiful saddle I’ve ever seen. It is a donation from some town in Oklahoma and is cowboy type [sic] with a great deal of sterling silver. He said it cost $2,000 . . . . I got a kick out of seeing Halsey when he scowled at the Japs as he stood behind Nimitz when the latter was signing the surrender document.” One of the naval officers wondered aloud whether MacArthur might like to borrow the saddle for a ride on the emperor’s mount. Eichelberger shook his head. It was his impression, he said, that the General had something else in mind.156

  MacArthur signs the instrument of surrender in Tokyo Bay

  Hirohito was a very ordinary man, a short, absentminded, forty-four-year-old father of six children who had inherited his father’s position nineteen years earlier and had been struggling ever since to make a success of it. His appearance was anything but imperial. On the streets of New York or London he wouldn’t have attracted a second glance. He was shy and round-shouldered, with a Chaplinesque profile and a weak, receding chin. His coordination was so shaky that he always seemed about to tumble over. His mustache was straggly, his face covered with moles, his spectacle lenses so thick that his eyes looked as though they had been put in by a taxidermist. Around the house he wore shabby clothes and scuffed shoes. Often he needed a shave; frequently he forgot to fasten his trousers. As a youth he had toured Europe, where he had been introduced to jazz, whiskey, and golf, all of which he still enjoyed. His only known passion, however, was marine biology. He had published several scholarly, if dull, books on marine life, and he loved to disappear into his modest home laboratory for an afternoon with his microscope and his slides. He probably preferred fish to people.

  That is how he looked to Western observers. His subjects saw him very differently. Or rather, they didn’t see him at all, because on those rare occasions when he appeared in public, they averted their eyes, having been taught as children that if their eyes met his for even a fraction of a second, they would be struck blind. They believed him to be the one hundred twenty-fourth direct descendant of the emperor Jimmu Tenno, who had ruled their ancestors in the seventh century before Christ. In his divine role Hirohito had begun his reign by christening it Showa, which means, of all things, “bright peace, ” but during the war the irony had passed unnoticed; no Japanese would have dreamed of forming an opinion about anything the emperor said, even when they understood him, which was seldom. His ministers found conversations with him extremely difficult. He often expressed himself vaguely, sometimes by reciting a seventeen-syllable haiku which seemed irrelevant to the discussion. As a rule, he received them sitting silently on his throne atop a high dais draped in gold brocade, a traditional six-paneled gilt screen behind him, his mere presence making their decisions official. Yet he could be trenchant when necessary. He had approved the surrender in two sentences: “I cannot bear to see my innocent people suffer any longer. Ending the war is the only way to restore world peace and to relieve the nation from the terrible distress with which it is burdened.”

  B-29 bombardiers had been ordered to spare his curved-tile-roofed, pagoda-styled, gray-walled imperial residence, but flying debris had leaped over the palace moat during several raids. The pavilions of the crown prince and the dowager empress had been reduced to cinders. Hirohito and his empress, Nagato, were now living with their children in the imperial library, the obunko, situated in the imperial garden, about a half-mile from the palace. A long stairway led down to a bombproof underground complex where the emperor received his advisers. Having listened to the Missouri ceremony over his radio, he awaited Kase’s account of it. No imperial decision could alter the course of the new MacArthur regime, but public approval of it by Hirohito would avoid a great deal of heartache for both the occupied country and its occupiers.157

  Shigemitsu and the other members of Prince Higashikuni’s cabinet felt certain that the emperor would sanction full cooperation with the Allies. He had already suggested as much. During an audience the morning after the capitulation he had produced a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper, the Maini-chi. The author of the piece, Baron Kantaro Suzuki, had been prime minister at the time—he had stepped down si
nce, to assist in the transition to peace—and in his article he had written that he had “one absolute conviction as to what to do,” which was “to trust the enemy commander. The ‘Bushido’ is not a Japanese monopoly. It is a universal code.” Although he did not know the Allied Supreme Commander, he said, he had “a firm trust in this soldierly spirit.” Japan had been defeated, and once defeat was acknowledged, as it had been, the only “manly thing to do” was “to leave everything to the victor.” In veiled phrases, and with sympathetic gestures, the emperor had signified that he concurred.158

  Now he read Kase’s report. It was an extraordinary document. Clearly MacArthur had made a proselyte here. The little diplomat wrote of the General: “He is a man of light. Radiantly, the gathering rays of his magnanimous soul embrace the earth.” It was, he went on “a piece of rare good fortune” that “a man of such caliber and character should have been designated as the Supreme Commander” to “shape the destiny of Japan. In the dark hour of our despair and distress, a bright light is ushered in, in the very person of General MacArthur. . . . The big day on the Missouri will stand out as one of the brightest dates in history, with General MacArthur as a shining obelisk in the desert of human endeavor that marks a timeless march onward toward an enduring peace.” There was much more, all in this vein. MacArthur himself could hardly have improved upon it.