American Caesar

by William Manchester

  With the exception of an occasional fireproof, earthquake-proof building, most of the rest was cinders and flinders. People were subsisting in it, in shacks and huts fashioned of corrugated iron strips. They had nowhere else to go. Over two million homes had been destroyed by LeMay’s air fleets, and the Japanese themselves had razed another half-million to make firebreaks. Nearly seven million Nipponese soldiers stationed in China, Korea, French Indochina, Malaya, and other outposts still guarded by the emperor’s armies would soon be demobilized and repatriated. Once they had returned, accompanied by the Japanese civilians like Yoshio Kodama who had ruled subjugated populations, Nippon’s home islands would need at least four million new dwellings. And the people must be fed. Women hid their nakedness, having exchanged their last kimonos for a go of seed; the clothing for whole families was reduced to a single yukata, a simple cotton kimono. Kodama, awaiting trial as a war criminal for the plunder of Shanghai, wrote in prison that “the Japanese nation must rely upon the co-operation of the American army authorities for the very rice it eats.” MacArthur set up army kitchens and cabled Washington that he needed 3,500,000 tons of food immediately. The Pentagon quibbled; the State Department demanded details; there were forms to be filled out, officials to be consulted, bureaucratic channels to be explored. The General grimly cabled again: “Give me bread or give me bullets.”10

  Most of the empire’s natural leaders were dead. Over 1,270,000 Japanese had been killed in action during the last four years of fighting, and 670,000 civilians had died in the bombings. MacArthur wrote: “Never in history had a nation and its people been more completely crushed.” Kenney thought they were “suffering from shell shock.” John Gunther wrote that “the bitter sting and humiliation of defeat’ had left the people “dazed, tottering, and numb with shock.” Six days after the formal surrender, MacArthur rode into the capital. Except for the emperor’s gleaming fleet of limousines, there seemed to be no other cars in the city. The General found himself looking out at a pulverized moonscape inhabited by staring scarecrows of men and women who giggled hysterically and fled: “It was just 22 miles from the New Grand Hotel in Yokohama to the American Embassy, which was to be my home throughout the occupation, but they were 22 miles of devastation and vast piles of charred rubble.”11

  Hardly had the Japanese become accustomed to the sight of their conquerors when Hirohito, without consulting the General, dealt them another blow in an imperial rescript: “We stand by the people and we wish always to share with them in their moments of joys and sorrows. The ties between us and our people have always stood upon mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese people are superior to other races and fated to rule the world.” In other words, they had fought for a lie. American wartime propaganda had been right. Their sovereign was not an Oriental counterpart of Wotan and Thor. They had been ruled by a man, not a god, and their ancestors, 123 generations of them, had been equally gulled. Kenney recalls that the emperor’s edict meant they had “nothing spiritual to cling to. . . . There was complete apathy everywhere.” MacArthur noted that their whole world had crumbled: “It was not merely the overthrow of their military might—it was the collapse of a faith, it was the disintegration of everything they believed in and lived by and fought for. It left a complete vacuum, morally, mentally, and physically.” Their past meant nothing now. They must say sayonara to all that. Their future depended upon whatever flowed into the vacuum, upon what was done with the great mass of emotion which lay ready for a new sculptor.12

  President Truman had appointed MacArthur Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) without consulting anyone outside his immediate staff. Later he regretted the decision, but except among Pacific veterans and liberal ideologues it was a popular choice in the United States. If the polls are to be believed, the new SCAP was the second-most-admired hero among his countrymen in the high summer of 1945, second only to Eisenhower. He himself clearly savored his role as viceroy of Japan, calling it “Mars’ last gift to an old warrior.” He began his new assignment by startling everyone. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who had drawn up a plan to scourge the Germans, had prepared a similar punitive blueprint for the Japanese. Morgenthau assumed that the proud officer who had been mortified on Corregidor would support it. To his consternation the General said: “If the historian of the future should deem my service worthy of some slight reference, it would be my hope that he mention me not as a commander engaged in campaigns and battles, even though victorious to American arms, but rather as one whose sacred duty it became, once the guns were silenced, to carry to the land of our vanquished foe the solace and hope and faith of Christian morals.”13

  At the time those words sounded singular, even bizarre. Few other victors felt that way. They had cheered when Halsey kept his promise by riding a horse—not the emperor’s, but white and handsome—through gutted Tokyo, and when forty-one U.S. correspondents had been invited to attend an extraordinary session of the 84th Diet on September 4, which Hirohito had personally addressed, urging “reconstruction in every field,” thirty-seven of the reporters refused to attend because they were told they must check their weapons at the door. But MacArthur had been determined from the beginning to be conciliatory. As Prime Minister Higashikuni had followed the emperor to the podium, explaining the decision to capitulate, Eichelberger’s Eighth Army had been following the 4th Marines ashore. His soldiers had expected that they would be told to disarm the 250,000 enemy soldiers still entrenched on the Kanto Plain. Instead SCAP’s General Order No. 1 directed the enemy’s own commanders to do it.14

  It was, MacArthur explained to his troubled staff, a matter of face. If the Nipponese troops were humiliated now, they would be difficult later. He had another, practical reason. There were millions of bejeweled samurai swords in Japanese closets, a potential threat to the occupying army. Once the people learned that surrendering them was to be voluntary, he predicted they would give them to GIs. Precisely that happened; presently a ship sailed for San Francisco bearing seven tons of glittering souvenirs for the folks at home. Next the General vetoed suggestions that he summon Hirohito to appear before him. Better the patience of the East than the haste of the West, he said; in time the mikado would come to him, if only out of curiosity. The following day SCAP angered the U.S. Navy by countermanding a Halsey order. The admiral had forbidden Nipponese fishermen to cross Tokyo Bay, suspecting that some of them might plant mines beneath warships of the Third Fleet. Nonsense, said MacArthur; fishing was a life-or-death matter for these men, and for the starving people who needed their catches. When there were no incidents, he shone still brighter in the eyes of his new Oriental constituency.15

  In Tokyo, as in the past, part of the General’s problem with his own countrymen was his magniloquence, which would have pleased his father’s contemporaries but which sounded tinny to Americans of the 1940s. As correspondents assembled for the reopening of the battered granite U.S. embassy on Renanzaka Hill, an honor guard of the old 7th Cavalry fell in, and bugles sounded, the General turned to Eichelberger and intoned: “Have our country’s flag unfurled, and in the Tokyo sun let it wave in its full glory, as a symbol of hope for the oppressed and as a harbinger of victory for the right. ” American intellectuals jeered. But they should have watched his performance more carefully. Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who did, wrote of postwar Japan that “the overpowering need was for faith, for a mystique, for a moral revival in the midst of moral collapse. The powerful and dedicated figure of MacArthur filled that need, as probably no other American general could have filled it.”16

  In the beginning there was little reason to believe that his achievements as proconsul would eclipse those on the battlefield. He himself said: “It was different when we were on the axis [fighting the war]. But this is something new, and there is nothing about it in history.” Actually there was, and mo
st of it was depressing. Most illustrious commanders who had tried their hand at civilian administration—Wellington, Kitchener, Petain—had dulled their luster. MacArthur regarded Napoleon as “the greatest soldier who ever lived,” yet he said of him: “Napoleon was a genius on the battlefield. He could make combinations that no one else thought of, but in political affairs he listened to his advisers too much. He had some excellent ideas but he lost his belief in them when he listened to those around him. And he was tired. The drive that kept him going was wearing out.”17

  The General retained his own drive. In thirty-four years he hadn’t lost a day to illness. His physician found that his reflexes were those of a man of fifty. Shortly after the occupation began he developed a strep throat; waving away the doctor, he recovered with the help of a dubious patent medicine gargle he had used off and on since his gassing in 1918. He was still charged with vitality, still flamboyant, still haughty. Though thinner now than during the months in New Guinea, “the Supreme Commander,” wrote Russell Brines, chief of the Associated Press’s Tokyo bureau, “did not mellow with the years, nor relax with the considerable, but largely unpublicized, achievements of the occupation. He drove onward with the same energy, the same impatient obduracy, the same confidence.” Time (to his annoyance) reported that “his hair, flecked with gray, is usually carefully brushed to cover a bald spot.” C. L. Sulzberger thought him “a remarkable physical specimen. . . . I am told he dyes his hair. Be that as it may, he is a handsome, well set up man filled with youthful energy. He is taller than I expected. . . . He eats and drinks sparingly but does no exercise. In a uniform he cuts a very lithe figure.”18

  Ambassador William J. Sebald, who was the ranking U.S. diplomat in Tokyo, believes that had MacArthur been “a less resolute commander . . . the occupation might have been a complete fiasco.” Because he had held such a wide brief during the war, the General assumed that he needed little or no advice from Washington now. Unlike the brisk Lucius Clay in Germany, he regarded his task as an exalted historical mission. And, unlike Napoleon, he had always been ready to turn a deaf ear to appeals from his subordinates. In Japan he heeded their advice less and less: “Sometimes my whole staff was lined up against me. But I knew what I was doing. After all, I had more experience than they. And most of the time I was right.” His instincts told him to work through the emperor, combining “the best of ours with the best of theirs,” and his brief tour in occupied Germany after World War I had convinced him that banning social contacts with the defeated population was poor policy. “Soldiers will be soldiers,” he said. He thought GIs were more interested in companionship than in sex anyhow, though he wasn’t against that, either. During one of his drives through the capital he saw an American soldier embracing a Japanese girl in a doorway, fondling her breasts as she reached between his thighs. “Look at that,” the General said to Major Faubion Bowers. “They keep trying to get me to stop all this Madam Butterflying around. I won’t do it. My father told me never to give an order unless I was certain it would be carried out. I wouldn’t issue a no-fraternization order for all the tea in China.” Nor would he deliberately offend the nation which lay at his feet, though some of his officers were less generous. Whitney, in his memoirs, proudly describes his treatment of Jiro Shirasu, a Nipponese statesman who kept him and several other officers waiting. Shirasu apologized for the delay. Whitney writes, “I replied with a smile: ‘Not at all, Mr. Shirasu. We have been enjoying your atomic sunshine.’ And at that moment, with what could not have been better timing, a big B-29 came roaring over us. The reaction upon Mr. Shirasu was indescribable, but profound. ”19

  MacArthur was above such crude gloating, too respectful of Japanese feelings. Luckily for him, and even luckier for them, he had a free hand in charting Japan’s course. Theoretically he was governed by directives from Washington. Secretary of War Robert Patterson and Secretary of State James F. Byrnes insisted that he had no voice in occupation policy, and Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson claimed that it had been worked out by the State, War, and Navy departments. But Acheson conceded that Averell Harriman couldn’t present an occupation proposal to Stalin because of “last-minute objections from MacArthur,” which hardly makes the General sound like a subordinate. In fact, Ambassador Sebald’s reports to his superiors in Foggy Bottom had to be approved by SCAP; Sebald couldn’t even accept an invitation to visit the emperor and empress in their Hayama villa without the Supreme Commander’s permission. SCAP was in effect an absolute monarch. Yet his goals were anything but monarchical. Spending a million dollars a day, he was introducing a new concept, and a new word, into the Japanese language: demokrashi. It would have been easy for him to have remained a dictator—his critics had expected him to do just that—and easier for him to have restored prewar Japanese society. Instead he was taking a line so liberal that it would have cost another officer, Clay, for example, his commission. SCAP’s staff followed him blindly, often despite their deeply held conservative beliefs. Thus Whitney, the very paradigm of a Taft Republican, was overheard telling a Japanese politician, “The only thing that will save your country is a sharp swing to the left.”20

  Diplomats’ fussiness over legal proprieties had nettled MacArthur in the past, and would again in Korea, but during his first four months in Tokyo he benefited from it. His viceregal authority derived from the Potsdam proclamation demanding Japan’s unconditional surrender. That ultimatum had been broadcast on July 27, twelve days before the Russians entered the Pacific war. Therefore all other Allied belligerents enjoyed seniority over them, and they, feeling slighted, angrily refused to sit on an Allied Council organized to advise the General in late August. Thus torn by dissension, the council was impotent during the autumn, when he was establishing precedents. Among other things, he excluded the establishment of different occupation zones. On December 27, when the council finally met in Tokyo to plan Japan’s future, the Soviets were reminded that four months earlier Stalin had approved the appointment of a single American commander in Tokyo. Now they wanted to change that. They proposed that MacArthur be supervised by a four-power council. In Washington some members of the Truman administration wanted to divide SCAP’s authority with the Russians and the British. The General, however, leaked word of this to an American reporter, saying he would “quit and go home” if that happened, and Washington backed down. In the end the four-power council was established, but he largely ignored it. In Sebald’s words, “thereafter he conducted a successful rearguard action against any dilution of this autonomy.”21

  Theoretically, he was answerable to four men in Washington: the President, the secretary of war (later defense), the army Chief of Staff, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Technically, he should also have been guided by a directive instructing him to take no steps toward the rehabilitation of Nippon’s economic life, the relief of civilian suffering, or the restoration of a decent standard of living. However, Byrnes and Acheson notwithstanding, he had also been designated the only American official abroad who could make policy statements without consulting the State Department first, and had been informed by the President: “You will exercise your authority as you deem proper to carry out your mission. Our relations with Japan do not rest on a contractual basis, but on unconditional surrender . . . your authority is supreme. “ The General characteristically chose the broadest possible interpretation of his mandate, and it should be noted that Truman was content then to find the new SCAP freely making sweeping judgments in political matters. Everyone except the Russians agreed; by sheer force of personality and what Ambassador Sebald calls “the wizardry of MacArthur,” he turned the occupation into a one-man show. The ambassador concludes: “Never before in the history of the United States had such enormous and absolute power been placed in the hands of a single individual.”22

  Never in American history, but it had happened before in Asia; Japanese shoguns during the Tokugawa regime of 1598-1868, the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in Indochina, and such Englishmen as Cliv
e and Warren Hastings in India had been benevolent despots. Yet none of them ruled more absolutely than MacArthur in Japan—and, though most of his countrymen were unaware of it, his powers extended to the Philippines and the Mariana Islands: the homelands, altogether, of over a hundred million people. He was the last of the great colonial overlords, remote and unapproachable by all except a few natives. “I had to be,” he wrote afterward, “an economist, a political scientist, an engineer, a manufacturing executive, a teacher, even a theologian of sorts.” If that suggests that he regarded his task as a burden, it errs. He enjoyed it enormously. He intended, he said, to convert Dai Nippon 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.” In short, he, acting as an autarch, meant to impose freedom on the conquered nation. The Diet agreed that Shinto (the way of the gods) should be replaced by Minshushugi (the way of democracy). Presently Japanese, practicing their first English words, would approach GIs and say, “Her-ro, Joe. Demokrashi must be good, yes? Goodabye.’ It is unlikely that any of them understood democracy then; that first winter it merely signified chocolate bars, pop music, jukeboxes, cigarettes, soap operas, and B-29burgers. But it meant little more to Eichelberger’s soldiers, and even MacArthur confused it with baseball, George M. Cohan, firecrackers, Memorial Day parades, reliable plumbing, John Philip Sousa, and nostalgic memories of America at the turn of the century. The astonishing paradox remains: the experiment succeeded, and it probably would have failed if the General had been less than omnipotent.23