Chapter 13, “The Imperial Military,” examines the remnants of the Imperial Army and the challenges former soldiers had with accepting a democratic Japan and an NPR that was limited in its roles, missions, and political-legal power. In particular, Kowalski looks at some of the Rightist groups and efforts of some of the former Imperial military officers to exert their influence in the creation of the NPR.
Chapter 14, “Dawn of a New Era,” discusses the various social and political changes Japan had undergone in the early postwar years to become an established democracy before it returned to the international community of nations in 1952. The NPR, which became the National Safety Force (Hoantai) in October of that year, had come to embrace civilian control, and the people had come to accept the existence of the NPR despite the radicalism that was caused by the Communist Party and its supporters.
Chapter 15, “Conclusion: A Critique,” serves as the concluding chapter. In it, Kowalski reviews the political, social, and legal challenges involved, from a U.S. as well as Japanese perspective, in establishing the NPR as well as the development of the Self-Defense Forces, created in July 1954. He acknowledges mistakes the U.S. and Japanese governments made along the way, feeling that the two governments “trampled upon the Japanese Constitution, deliberately confusing the truth and sadly violating moral commitments.” At the same time, he is critical of the Socialist and other opposition political parties for refusing to recognize the “dangers facing the nation,” adopting a “rigid political stance,” as well as “confus[ing] the electorate and in the end achiev[ing] little of positive value.” Despite the various challenges and problems at the time, he argues that this “inoffensive rearmament,” in which, “within the limitations imposed by the structural deficiencies of the Constitution, Japan [developed] a small, modern, highly effective military establishment and a significant armament industry,” helped to build the foundation for Japan’s later prosperity.
Please be aware that Kowalski’s occasional use of the words “now,” “today,” and “currently” throughout the text refer to the late 1960s, when he wrote the book, and not necessarily to the present in 2013. Please also note that Japanese names appear as Kowalski wrote them, in Western order (personal name first followed by family name), rather than the traditional Japanese style of family name first followed by personal name.
About Kowalski
Frank Kowalski was born in Bristol, Connecticut, on October 18, 1907, to Polish immigrants Frank and Mary Kowalczyk. Both were originally from Warsaw, although the family name of Kowalczyk (meaning “blacksmith”) is Belorussian and the mother’s maiden name, Miller, was Germanic. Frank (Sr.) came to the United States in 1901 through Ellis Island, and Mary, short, stocky, with dark hair, came in 1902, also through Ellis Island.
Frank did not have any siblings, but there was another child, Josephine, in the family who had lost her parents and was taken care of by the Kowalskis. She was like a sister to him. Frank Sr. was an illiterate foundry worker, and little Frank spoke Polish at home until he went to school at age seven. Presumably, his English was limited at that time, but he studied hard. According to his daughter, Frank’s mother was “a dynamic force to him. She often told him he could become King of Poland.”
The Kowalski family was poor, but just as Dwight D. Eisenhower, for whom Frank would later work, observed of his own family’s economic situation, they did not know they were poor. Growing up on a farm, young Frank was rewarded with healthy exercise and a work ethic stimulated by daily chores and forced responsibility. He milked two cows daily, first at 5 a.m. and again in the evening. As a blizzard approached late one day, delaying his parents’ return from work and errands, eleven-year-old Frank milked all fourteen cows by himself.
His mother used to share stories of Poland, its history, and all the Catholic cultural rituals. Unlike his father, Frank’s mother was literate, and she would read to all the Polish residents in the area who were not. It was his mother who sent Frank to the Alliance Preparatory School, a Polish parochial boarding school, in Erie, Pennsylvania, for an education that included learning about Polish history, culture, language, and customs. He was able to attend the private school on a sports scholarship, playing both baseball and football. He became quarterback and led a team that included bigger and much older young men who had returned from World War I. According to his son, a 1922 photo shows Frank standing upright and relaxed with a smile on his leather-helmeted face behind the rest of his teammates, all crouched in three-point stances: “It’s obvious that he is the boss and brains of the outfit.”12
Frank was sixteen when his mother died at the age of fifty-five. He was “plucked” from the school, according to his daughter, “by his father who wouldn’t pay.” At the public school in Meriden he went to upon returning to Connecticut, a chemistry teacher recognized Frank’s mathematical and scientific gifts and got to know his family circumstances. He suggested the United States Army enlistment program, which allowed for enlistees to try for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point through an examination.
When things became bad at home with his alcoholic father and new stepmother, Frank ran away and enlisted in the Army in 1924 right after Christmas. He was seventeen but lied and said he was eighteen, a falsehood that later caused problems when he was going for retirement. He continued to study hard, using library textbooks and past examinations to teach himself the core courses he had missed in leaving high school. After eighteen months of study, he successfully passed the test and received an appointment to West Point in the summer of 1927. He eventually graduated in 1930. His daughter wrote, “I always felt this leap forward was the greatest risk he ever took and forged his greatest success—an appointment to West Point. His move to Congress was less a stretch than that effort. I often used his story to help boys in high school who struggled with handicaps of life.”
On trips back to Meriden during his time at West Point, Frank occasionally visited Helene Amelia Bober, a childhood friend three years his junior. The connection seems to have been that Helene’s parents were from the same village in Poland as Josephine’s future husband, Vincent Scotniki. At the time, Helene, who had already graduated from high school, was working in the office of the mayor of New Britain, Connecticut, a small city in the central part of the state nine miles southwest of the capital city of Hartford, close to Meriden. Because of its large Polish population, the city was and apparently still is called “New Britski.”
Frank’s first assignment was Fort Holabird, Maryland, an Army installation established in 1917. After he had purchased a car and was able to make the drive up to Connecticut, he began seriously “courting” Helene. She even traveled to Baltimore, chaperoned by Josephine, to see him. Their relationship became particularly intense in the summer of 1931, and they got married on October 20 of that year.
Their first duty station together was Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, where they moved after the wedding. There Frank led an infantry machine-gun platoon in maneuvers against the cavalry, helping to establish the supremacy of firepower over horsepower. Next he commanded a platoon of motorcycles through an upstate New York winter, attempting to execute one of the Army’s various plans to replace the horse with the motorcycle.
In 1936, as part of two postgraduate study opportunities he would get, he was sent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he earned his MS in mechanical engineering. His thesis concerned the armored plating of tanks, perhaps due to his then being in the Armor Branch.
In 1937, after he had switched to the Ordnance Branch, he went to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. While there, he experimented with a variety of weaponry and new technology, including the prototype of a tank-piercing bullet. One day, a bullet ricocheted 180 degrees off the side of a tank and imbedded itself in Frank’s cheek between skin and bone, giving him a permanent scar. “Despite having shot himself,” his son recalls, Frank “gathered several patents and membership in the fledgling American Roc
ket Society, a life-long avocation, tinkering as an inventor.”13
Subsequently he changed to infantry and was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, to study at the infantry school. It was there that the Kowalskis’ first child, Carol, was born in September 1938. Around this time Frank was also promoted to captain.
In 1938, Frank found himself in Anniston, Alabama, and then later in Tampa, Florida, as an engineer to help construct McGill Field. This assignment was followed by time at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. As war approached, he returned to the Armor Branch and was sent to Pine Camp (later Fort Drum), New York, in 1941 into 1942. With the North Africa campaign developing, the family went to Palm Springs, California, in 1942 for desert training. The Army then sent Frank to Fort Leavenworth, followed by Fort Campbell, and then back to Leavenworth for Command and Staff School in 1943–44.
By this point, Frank was extremely frustrated about having not been sent into combat. From Leavenworth, Lieutenant Colonel Kowalski (he was promoted to full colonel one year later) was sent to work for General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the commanding general of the European Theater of Operations, where he worked in the G-3 Division for Civil Affairs and Operations. He landed on Omaha Beach on June 20, 1944, and soon thereafter was in Paris. He then traveled over France before going east to Poland (Krakow, Warsaw, and Czestochova) and Czechoslovakia. He collected data to help the people establish civil government.
The Kowalskis’ second child, Barry, was born in August 1944 at Hartford Hospital. Frank was not there for the birth as he was in London and Scotland for part of the war. Nevertheless, his time in Poland was especially meaningful for him.
Kowalski returned to the United States in autumn 1944 and went to the Pentagon and then to Columbia University to prepare for going to Moscow as a military attaché. The family also began to prepare, purchasing warm clothing for the Russian winter, shots, and Russian-language training. But their plans were abruptly canceled. Kowalski had developed stomach problems during the war years and had become quite ill; he entered Walter Reed General Hospital for a subsequent stomach operation. The Russia assignment was canceled because in case of an emergency the nearest suitable hospital was in Stockholm, Sweden. Seeking treatment in the States proved to be a good decision as Kowalski underwent a second operation shortly thereafter that removed his entire stomach. He left Walter Reed a gaunt skeleton around Christmas 1946, after nearly eighteen months there.
Kowalski’s next assignment was at the Pentagon, where he served until he went to Japan in January 1948. The Kowalski family followed him in June. He served in the military government in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan’s former capital, until October 1948 and then in the military government in Ōsaka, Japan’s second largest city at the time, until September 1949. Next he served in the Chugoku area, in Kure City, until the spring of 1950, when he was sent to Tōkyō to work under Major General Whitfield P. Shepard, the chief of the Civil Affairs Section at General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for Allied Powers—General Douglas A. MacArthur’s headquarters. It was shortly after this that Kowalski was given the task of standing up the postwar Japanese military, which is covered in detail in this book.
Kowalski left Japan with his family in June 1952, several weeks after the end of the Allied occupation and the restoration of Japanese sovereignty. After enjoying a couple of months of leave, he went to Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he was post commander, a job his daughter said he “hated and arranged for a transfer to Fort Meade after only two months.” He did not like the new job, assisting with reserve officer’s training, either, and he moved to Camp (later Fort) Pickett, near Blackstone, Virginia.
One issue that was complicating things at the time was McCarthyism, which was greatly damaging morale in the U.S. government. Kowalski’s daughter, who was fourteen at the time, recalls the arguments between her father and mother over her father’s refusal to sign “the pledge.” At the height of the “Red Scare,” the military was requiring its colonels and generals to sign a “loyalty oath,” which Kowalski was unwilling to do out of principle. ‘“God damn it,’ he would howl at Mom, ‘I swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution when I was a cadet. No one has the right to question my loyalty after all these years.’ Colonel Kowalski never signed a ‘loyalty pledge’ and I am not sure how he avoided the threatened consequences,” Carol later said.
Following this period of McCarthyism, the Army began to recognize the need to introduce modern business methods into its leadership and management practices, and Kowalski, who had an ego and “fought like hell to get a job worthy of himself,” was subsequently assigned to help found the Command Management School located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Kowalski created, organized, and became the first commandant of the school, and he chose to model its pedagogy after the Harvard Business School Case Study method of learning. According to his son, this was “radical military thinking at the time.” Another radical policy Kowalski implemented was preventing the “natural proclivity” of staff at the school to say “no” to requests. He told the staff that they could approve things without his concurrence, but if they wanted to disapprove something, they had to come to him. This policy “promoted action and progress.”
The school regularly had guest speakers who were businessmen and elected officials, which Barry thinks created connections for his father and may have helped lead him to Congress. The idea of guest speakers seems to have come from a visit Kowalski made to Columbia University. When he returned home, Kowalski was infatuated with a speaker he had heard, Charles Percy, then president of Bell and Howell (and later a U.S. senator). Being commandant of the school gave him access not only to business leaders, but also to those in the highest levels of the Pentagon and political leaders in the executive branch and Congress. It was this latter group that Kowalski would join following his military career.
During his time in the Army, he had stayed in touch with his hometown friends, many of whom had entered local politics. Several of them had urged him to run for office when he returned from Japan. Kowalski eventually retired from the Army in 1958 to run for Congress from Connecticut, and he was elected to the Eighty-Sixth Congress that year. He had been strongly supported by a local political boss who needed a Polish candidate to run because of the heavy Polish constituency in the state. In 1960, he was re-elected to the Eighty-Seventh Congress, but had lost a bid in 1962 for a seat in the U.S. Senate from Connecticut when his political sponsor would not endorse him. He ran as an independent and lost, turning his sponsor into an enemy. He subsequently wrote an unpublished memoir about this experience titled “Worms in Charter Oak,” a strong indictment of the influence of political bosses and the danger of vested interests in a democracy.
In January 1963, Kowalski was nominated by President John F. Kennedy to be a member of the Subversive Activities Control Board, or SACB, a body established in 1950 to examine communist influence in various organizations. Ironically, the hearings before the Internal Security Subcommittee were postponed several times owing to a “rumor that somewhere in the power structure there might be a suspicion that he was a peacemonger.”14 Eventually, Kowalski was confirmed in October of that year, and he served until September 1966.
According to his son, Kowalski
did not want the appointment. But Dad needed a year of service at a presidential appointment level on top of his time in Congress for four years to achieve a substantial retirement. His battle to run as an independent for the Senate had left him out of favor. Consequently, his enemies in the administration offered that appointment for two reasons: (1) Dad did not want the job (it offended his liberal political views), and (2) it would be difficult for Dad, a liberal, to get confirmation votes in the Senate. And they only promised a nomination, not a job. Give him job he doesn’t want and likely cannot get. And so Dad had to “campaign” to get it. To be confirmed, he spent time getting the votes of southern conservatives. Once on the board, however, Dad found a sympathetic soul, Governor Francis Cherry of Arkansas (who preceded the infamous O
rval E. Faubus). They teamed up to defeat everything that was a threat to civil liberties. Cherry had been also nominated for the board in a begrudged fulfillment of a political obligation to him. The anticommunists regretted the day those two partnered up. The two of them could together prevent repressive board action and did. Under Kowalski/ Cherry, the SACB became an irrelevance; although Dad and Cherry had only a couple of years to work together [Cherry died in 1965], they accomplished it. Maybe Lyndon B. Johnson shrewdly made those appointments to undermine the anticommunist movement? More likely, Dad always felt that he got the last laugh out of the matter.
President Johnson did not renominate him, and Kowalski reportedly made no effort to seek renomination. “It’s not,” he said later, “much of a job at all.”15 It was during the time he served on the board that he worked on this manuscript.
Kowalski’s continuing an interest in Japan during this time was demonstrated by a letter he wrote in late June 1960 to President Eisenhower, whose visit to Japan had recently been canceled owing to riots over the Japanese government’s handling of the ratification of the revised bilateral security treaty.16 In his capacity as congressman-at-large representing Connecticut, Kowalski wrote to the president to propose dispatching General MacArthur to Japan again on a mission to improve relations with Japan:
An Inoffensive Rearmament Page 2