The Emperor's General

by James Webb

  “The cane,” said MacArthur, pointing to Wainwright’s side. “Didn’t I give you that? In Manila?”

  “Yes, General,” said Wainwright, flattered that MacArthur would remember, his eyes now going far away into a past that could never be recaptured. “Before the war. You said I needed a swagger stick.”

  Manila. Like a song it held a special romance for all of us, leading even me to stutter in my thoughts. The memory of life before the war hung like a heavy weight between them, causing both of their heads to sag. For several seconds, neither man could speak. Finally MacArthur gestured toward his table.

  “I’m having dinner. Could you join me?”

  A grateful smile grew on Wainwright’s face, and he shook his head. “No, General, I wouldn’t do that to you.” Wainwright seemed suddenly exhausted, as if MacArthur’s blessing had taken away an enormous load. “I believe I’d like to take a rest if you don’t mind.”

  MacArthur pointed at me. “Make sure General Wainwright is given a superior room, Jay. A suite.”

  “I don’t need a suite,” chuckled Wainwright.

  “A suite, Jay,” insisted MacArthur. “Even if you have to evict a current occupant.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  MacArthur gave Wainwright another fatherly hug. “We’ll have a special place for you on the battleship. I want the Japanese to be staring right into your eyes when they sign the surrender document.”

  “I’m pleased to be invited, General,” answered Wainwright. “The last time I went through one of these the shoe was on the other foot.”

  MacArthur visibly winced as he released Wainwright. Then he headed slowly back toward his dining table.

  I turned to Wainwright, gesturing toward the lobby. “General?”

  We crept carefully, paced by Wainwright’s cane. “We’re not going to evict anybody, Captain,” he said as we exited the restaurant. “I’ve lived in a box for three years. I’d go stir-crazy in a suite.”

  “We’ll get you a good room, sir.”

  “So you work directly for General MacArthur?” asked Wainwright as he hobbled toward the desk.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re a lucky man,” he said, staring back toward the restaurant. “I’d follow MacArthur to hell and back. In fact, I guess I just did.”

  I found a handsome suite for Wainwright and had the hotel staff bring him a full meal. An hour passed. A cable arrived, posted from our military headquarters in Manila. The cable was marked “URGENT—PERSONAL ATTENTION—SUPREME COMMANDER ALLIED POWERS.” And reading it I knew instinctively that another, far more dangerous ghost had emerged to confront MacArthur’s pleasant leap toward deification.

  General Tomoyuki Yamashita, still commanding the Japanese defenses from a fortified redoubt high in the mountains of northern Luzon near Baguio, had radioed Manila that he would formally surrender on September 2, once he was certain that the Japanese government had signed the surrender documents aboard the Missouri.

  It was well after dinner. I found MacArthur in his suite, pacing exuberantly before Generals Willoughby and Whitney. The three had been meeting around the clock for days, analyzing the gargantuan Willoughby’s carefully prepared, if spotty, intelligence reports and preparing the positions Court Whitney would take on behalf of MacArthur in his meetings with Japanese government officials. The supreme commander had spent most of the day working on what would become a masterpiece performance aboard the Missouri. Watching him as I entered the room, I could tell he was sensing for the first time that he was assured of a special place in history.

  I stepped hesitantly into his suite, stopping just inside the doorway. He gave me a fatherly wink. “Isn’t it past your bedtime, Jay?”

  I flushed, smiling back, content as ever to play the jester to his royal court. “The forces of freedom are never asleep, sir.”

  “Spoken like a true liberator,” joked Court Whitney, looking up from his yellow legal pad.

  Willoughby spoke gruffly in his thick Teutonic accent. “Captain Marsh. Is this important?”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered, holding out the cable. “It’s marked urgent, for the supreme commander’s personal attention.”

  I handed the cable to Willoughby, who read it quickly and then gave it to MacArthur.

  “You won’t like this, General.”

  The General stared at the cable for a long time. It was almost as if he were trying to see beyond the words, perhaps all the way across the ocean to the jungled retreat where his greatest adversary was now preparing to surrender, so that he might fully comprehend the moment. Finally he handed the paper to General Whitney and began pacing again.

  “I felt certain he would commit seppuku.” MacArthur mumbled it bitterly, his face reeking with disappointment.

  “In his case,” agreed Willoughby, “it would have been an honorable gesture. An acceptance of responsibility.”

  “I warned him,” said MacArthur, pacing, his voice tightening with a new and raw emotion. “I warned him as soon as we landed at Leyte. Radio messages. Published documents. He knew beyond doubt that he would be held accountable for any acts of harm that befell prisoners of war or innocent civilians.” Suddenly he waved a finger into the air, raising his chin. “It is an ancient precept that the soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak. Of the unarmed.”

  MacArthur was speechifying now, as if justifying himself before the world for the actions he was certain to take. “And what happened? The grand city of Manila, sacked, its rare monuments in ruins. A hundred thousand innocents—Christians—many of them women and children, slaughtered. Rarely has so wanton an act been exposed to public gaze!” He looked over at his two generals, as if for support. “That he would now decide to hand over his sword in full dress uniform, wearing his soldiers’ medals, is an unspeakable disgrace.”

  “The Potsdam Declaration covers Yamashita’s conduct,” said the lawyer Whitney in his matter-of-fact tone. “It’s on the list, General. One of our first responsibilities. To round up the war criminals. I’ll take care of this situation, beginning the moment we set up shop in Tokyo.”

  “I don’t want him back in this country.”

  The way MacArthur spoke lent a ferocity to his words. When he said “this country” there was a note of ownership, as if Japan were now his very own fiefdom and Yamashita had become a dangerous enemy subversive.

  “We can try him in the Philippines,” shrugged Whitney, giving MacArthur a curious glance. “We’ll have to do some creative lawyering, but we’ll find a way. The offenses were committed there. The witnesses are there. In fact, Manila would be better, all things considered. It should be a catharsis for the people of the Philippines to see a major perpetrator brought to justice before their eyes.”

  “—Ever,” continued MacArthur. He had stopped pacing, and was now looking at his two key generals with a measured stare which told them beyond cavil that this was an irreversible order.

  “Ever is OK. A part of the equation.” Whitney nodded, looking down to his legal pad and writing as if making a note of it. “I’ll start talking to the legal people. We can set that up.”

  Willoughby scrutinized MacArthur’s scowl as if trying to determine the General’s mood. Then he agreed. “I see no reason for you to worry about General Yamashita coming back to Japan,” said Willoughby. “Certainly he will be convicted, and our legal staff can arrange for the trial to be in the Philippines. And then he will be put to death.”

  “The return of his remains will be permissible,” said MacArthur with a cold finality. The two generals nodded, taking him seriously.

  He turned to me now, watching me silently, pondering unspoken options. I grew uncomfortable under his meditative stare. And finally he spoke again. “Jay. Go back to the Philippines. Tomorrow morning. Waste no time. Go to Baguio. I want to know what he’s planning before I decide what to do.”

  He had confused me. “What he’s planning, sir?”

  MacArthur’s mind
was working furiously, off in a complicated region of power, politics, and reputation that was beyond my ken even to imagine. He began speaking of Yamashita as if the Japanese general held great authority and unseen sway. I had no idea what he meant. “Yes, Jay, what he’s planning. There will be a surrender—a ceremony of some sort—and there will be a trial. He will have the opportunity to speak, and he will be heard. So why is he surrendering? What is it that he wants to say? He knows he’s going to die. An honorable Japanese in his situation would accept that and take his own life, unless there is a reason to prolong his death. So what is it? Does he want to prolong his death so that he can make a statement about the war? About the future of Japan?”

  MacArthur hesitated, and in the shadows of his eyes I recalled all his moments of frustration over the past year in never having fully defeated the great Tiger of Malaya, despite his constant public utterances to the contrary. “About me? What?”

  Douglas MacArthur seemed to me at that moment a very worried man, although I still could not fathom his concerns. With all the war’s great players swirling about, and with all the millions of words now being spoken, why did it even matter what General Tomoyuki Yamashita wanted to say?

  “I don’t want a word of this in our message traffic,” he continued. “I don’t want General Yamashita to become a topic of conversation for half the American soldiers in Asia, and I don’t want the media to start debating his fate. But I do want to know what’s going on.”

  The General stared fiercely at me. “I want you there when Yamashita walks out of the jungle. I want you to talk to Yamashita on my behalf. Privately. Speaking in Japanese. Then I want to know his intentions.”

  I still had no idea what MacArthur was talking about. “Why he didn’t kill himself, you mean, sir?”

  “Why he remains alive.” The supreme commander said it as if there were somehow a difference in interpretation.

  “Right, sir. I’ll let you know.”

  I left it at that. After all, Willoughby and Court Whitney were nodding their silent agreement, fully understanding the supreme commander’s intonations. I decided that the rest of it would somehow clarify itself once I confronted Yamashita.

  The General turned away, abruptly dismissing me. “Don’t dally in Manila, Jay. We have plans to make. After you meet with Yamashita I want you back here immediately to give me a personal briefing.”

  PART TWO

  SEPTEMBER 1945–FEBRUARY 1946

  CHAPTER 8

  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. I speak for the unnamed brave millions homeward bound to take up the challenge of that future which they did so much to salvage from the brink of disaster.…”

  MacArthur’s poetic cadence sounded flat and hollow, echoing like ricochets off the sharp rocks and barren peaks of the central Cordillera Mountains. We were in northern Luzon’s Asin Valley, a mile high and a world away from Tokyo Bay, where Japan’s formal surrender was taking place on the main deck of the USS Missouri. But the surrender ceremony was being broadcast live across the world, even reaching this last remote outpost through radio speakers mounted on a nearby truck.

  Behind me a few American and Filipino soldiers faintly cheered the General’s rhetoric, but as with the rest of us the object of their greatest attention had yet to appear. All eyes remained nervously focused on a sharp break in the mountains to our front. We were standing at the infamous Bessang Pass, a deep cleavage in the raw, clifflike slopes through which General Tomoyuki Yamashita had withdrawn several months before to form his final defensive perimeter. There had been a few attacks and an attempted encirclement, but the Japanese had shut the Americans and Filipinos down at Bessang Pass. Narrow and long, it was Yamashita’s impenetrable Thermopylae.

  Near me, mulling about anxiously, were a half-dozen senior officers sent up from Manila by Lieutenant General Wilhelm Styer, commanding general of army forces, western Pacific. General Yamashita had agreed to walk through the pass and give himself over to General Styer’s staff members. It would then be their duty to escort the Japanese commander by truck and aircraft to the city of Baguio, where he would formally surrender at Camp John Hay to General Styer himself.

  Colonel Brute Petrulakis stood anxiously at my side as we waited for Yamashita to appear. A lanky, grey-haired veteran of two wars, Petrulakis commanded one of the regiments in the Thirty-second Infantry Division. Since I was General MacArthur’s personal representative to the surrender, he had been assigned to escort me during my visit to the division’s front lines. His regiment had been pursuing the Japanese general for months. In the process the colonel had become both leery and admiring of the general’s battlefield skills.

  Petrulakis checked his watch, peering toward the pass. “It wouldn’t be like him to come out here and quit,” he said.

  “He’ll come, sir,” I answered. “He’s probably listening to the ceremony on his own radio. His message indicated that he wouldn’t surrender until his government actually signed the documents. The war isn’t officially over until then.”

  MacArthur’s historic speech continued to echo through the mountains. This was the General’s greatest moment, and a part of me lamented that I was not there to witness it. I tried to imagine him standing on the deck of the battleship in the midst of perhaps the foremost assemblage of military legends that had ever gathered—Americans, British, French, Australians, Chinese, Dutch, and even the Russians. These were the men who had led the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines of all the Allied nations back from the dark days of 1942. They would be in raucous spirits as they milled about, calling to one another across the ship’s deck and renewing old acquaintances that for some spanned several decades.

  And in front of the General as he spoke would be the eleven-man Japanese delegation, led by the tiny, dourfaced Foreign Minister Mimoru Shigemitsu. The announcement that Shigemitsu would head the delegation had surprised the supreme commander. The proper signatory should have been the prime minister, Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni. But Prince Higashikuni was the emperor’s uncle, and the emperor had remained adamant that no member of the royal family should sign the humiliating surrender document. Foreign Minister Shigemitsu was old, one-legged, and in poor health. In Japanese eyes this made him the proper candidate to absorb this unprecedented shame on behalf of the royal family. At the right time, he could then be discarded from government as the new peace took hold, taking the shame with him to his retirement home, moving it quickly into the nation’s past.

  MacArthur’s words took on an unusual resonance here in the hard-fought Cordillera Mountains. “The issues, involving divergent ideals and ideologies, have been determined on the battlefields of the world and hence are not for our discussion or our debate. Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the peoples of the earth, in a spirit of distrust, malice, or hatred. But rather it is for us, both victors and vanquished, to rise to that higher dignity which alone benefits the sacred purposes we are about to serve, committing all our people unreservedly to faithful compliance with the understanding they are here formally to assume.

  “It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world 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.

  “As Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers I announce it my firm purpose to proceed in the discharge of my responsibilities with justice and tolerance, while taking all necessary dispositions to insure that the terms of the surrender a
re fully, promptly, and faithfully complied with.”

  Tolerance, he was now promising. Justice. A higher dignity.… And I could not help but wonder again what all these words had to do with the personal motivations that led to my present mission. Was it tolerance, justice, and a higher dignity that had caused the supreme commander to send me here to discover why General Yamashita wished to surrender rather than kill himself? Or was it a clever and unspoken fear?

  “It’s been like fighting a ghost,” said Petrulakis warily, still searching to his front. “A ghost with guns.”

  “MacArthur’s speech is over,” I said. “The documents are being signed. Then the war will be officially ended, and he’ll start walking out from his command post. He’ll be here soon.”

  “I just want to get a look at him,” continued Petrulakis. “I hear he’s big. He’s definitely smart. We chased the son of a bitch all over Luzon with eight infantry divisions, plus the First Cav, the Eleventh Airborne, three separate regimental combat teams, and a bunch of organized Filipino regiments. We killed a lot of soldiers, but I’ll tell you something. I’ve been in the army nearly thirty years and I’ve never seen anything like him. He ran our asses ragged. And we never caught him. What did he have to throw back at us? Soldiers, that was it. Bullets and grenades. No air force, no navy, no reinforcements, and no resupply.”

  Watching the Brute’s hard brown eyes squinting toward the pass, I empathized with him and his men. Though Japanese losses had been high, Yamashita’s gritty defense in the last nine months alone had caused nearly 40 percent of all the U.S. army’s battle casualties in the Pacific for all of World War Two, including the killed and wounded of the Army Air Corps. The long months of combat in the jungled mountains had taken another toll as well: our nonbattle losses—from battle fatigue, disease, and accidents—were twice as high as the combat injuries, an unusual occurrence.