When General Douglas MacArthur landed at Atsugi Airfield, near Yokohama, on August 30, 1945, there was indeed an element of déjà vu about the scene. MacArthur’s father, Arthur, had been the American commander in the Philippines at the height of the fighting from early 1900 until mid-1901. In 1914 Douglas MacArthur had been among the junior officers sent to occupy Veracruz. MacArthur had been in command of U.S. forces in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked the islands in 1941 (narrowly escaping capture). Small wonder MacArthur’s approach to the occupation of Japan bore the stamp of an earlier generation of American empire builders.
As supreme commander for the Allied powers (SCAP), MacArthur was omnipotent. “I had,” he later recalled, “not only the normal executive authorities such as our own President has in this country, but I had legislative authority. I could by fiat issue directives.”36 From his general headquarters in the Dai-ichi Building in downtown Tokyo, MacArthur and his staff, which initially numbered fifteen hundred, but which more than tripled in size in the space of three years, set out to achieve a “revolution” from above, to impose American “civilization” on a people most of them regarded as racially inferior.37
The trouble was that the aims of American policy were from the outset contradictory. On the one hand, by a combination of war crimes trials and purges, the Japanese elites were supposed to be cured of their militaristic, undemocratic ways. On the other, MacArthur could not govern Japan without the assistance of the existing Japanese bureaucracy. On the one hand, the Japanese were to be “reeducated” and their political system democratized. On the other, this was to be achieved by an absolute monarch in the person of MacArthur. On the one hand, Japan’s economy was to be deprived of its war-making potential. On the other, living standards had to be improved in order to avoid an excessively costly occupation.
The compromises that emerged undeniably worked, in the sense that Japan emerged from MacArthur’s rule as a democracy, albeit one dominated by a single party, and a dynamic market economy, albeit one based on a great deal more state intervention and a great deal more cartellike business collusion than existed in the United States. Yet this success was in many ways a triumph for the law of unintended consequences. The Americans set out to “get at the individual Japanese and remold his ways of thinking and feeling.”38 They achieved nothing of the sort; attempts at Christianization, with which MacArthur certainly sympathized, came to naught.39 Nor were Japan’s institutions more than partially transformed. The principal achievement of the occupation was to persuade the Japanese simply (in John Dower’s phrase) to “embrace defeat”; to renounce the pursuit of military power in what had proved an unwinnable competition against the United States in favor of the pursuit of economic riches as the Americans’ junior partners.
Superficially, the changes were impressive. The war crimes trials led to the conviction of all Japan’s war leaders, barring the emperor Hirohito himself, as well as around four thousand smaller fry, of whom more than nine hundred were executed. In addition, more than two hundred thousand senior figures were forced out of their positions in the country’s armed services, political parties and major corporations. The education system was overhauled, liberalized and decentralized; so was the police force. Civil, political and religious liberties were enshrined: women enfranchised, trade unions legalized, the press gradually freed.40 Though (on MacArthur’s recommendation) 41 the emperor remained under the new constitution of May 1947, he was henceforth no more than a figurehead; power was vested in a government responsible to a bicameral legislature. Japan was constitutionally bound to resort to armed force only in self-defense.42
Yet barely 1 percent of senior Japanese civil servants lost their jobs, and it was through the civil service that the Americans governed.43 How, otherwise, could the American occupation have functioned? Japan’s postwar masters were almost completely ignorant of the language and culture of their new subjects. Colonel Charles Kades, who played a pivotal role in the drafting of the constitution of 1947, later admitted: “I had no knowledge whatsoever about Japan’s history or culture or myths…. I was blank on Japan….”44 Moreover, the Americans generally confined themselves to their own “Little America” in Tokyo. As one of MacArthur’s senior staff put it, “For more than five years, with the rarest of exceptions, the only thing MacArthur saw of Japan physically was on the automobile route between the Dai-ichi Building and his quarters at the American Embassy, a distance of about a mile.”45 According to another insider, “only sixteen Japanese ever spoke with him [MacArthur] more than twice.”46 The wife of an American colonel later recalled being able to “walk from one end to the other [of Little America] … without ever being out of sight of an American face….”47
The achievement of the American occupations of Japan and West Germany most often emphasized today was the extraordinary economic recovery both countries enjoyed. In neither case was this an outcome the occupiers originally intended. On the contrary, the initial plan was to weaken their economies and impoverish their peoples. The mood among many Americans as the war drew to a close was retributive, not regenerative. One adviser to the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) proposed “almost [the] annihilation of the Japanese as a race.”48 The more restrained report of the Pauley Commission of late 1945 recommended the reduction of Japanese shipbuilding, chemicals and steel production, as well as the payment of reparations through the transfer of industrial plants to countries the Japanese had occupied during the war. In January 1946 the statistician and management expert W. Edwards Deming proposed the dismantling of monopoly companies; this was adopted by the SWNCC, which passed it on to the SCAP; as late as May 1947 it was still the centerpiece of economic policy when it was adopted by the Far Eastern Commission as directive FEC-230. The same concept underlay the Anti-Monopoly Law (April 1947) and the Deconcentration Law (December 1947), which designated over three hundred companies for dissolution.49 The targets of these measures were the notorious zaibatsu, in whose hands the ownership of Japanese industry had indeed been quite closely concentrated before 1945.50 Yet there was a problem—one that has been a characteristic of nearly all American occupations.
In theory—and in most of history—empires acquire foreign territory in order to collect rents of some sort, whether by taxing their inhabitants or by extracting natural resources. In practice, American occupations tend to cost American taxpayers money, at least to begin with. The army that occupied Japan was large: four hundred thousand strong at first, and although that number soon halved, it did not fall below one hundred thousand until 1957.51 Though the soldiers’ pay and the costs of their food continued to be covered by the U.S. Treasury, it was intended that the housing, office space, heating, light and transportation that the occupiers required would be paid for by the Japanese under the heading “war termination costs.” Yet in the immediate postwar period the Japanese were in no condition to shoulder such a burden. In June 1946 the inhabitants of war-ravaged Tokyo were surviving on just 150 calories per day, a tenth of the recommended intake.52 In the first budgets of the new Japanese government, the occupation costs accounted for a third of total government spending.53 Aid to Japan, primarily to pay for imported food and fertilizer, amounted to $194 million between August 1945 and December 1946. Despite all their schemes to “downsize” the Japanese economy, the Americans plainly had an interest in its rapid recovery.
The story was not wholly dissimilar in the American zone of occupation in western Germany, with one important difference. MacArthur relished his role as viceroy. His counterpart in Germany, a military engineer named General Lucius D. Clay, who succeeded Eisenhower as military governor of the U.S.-occupied zone, could scarcely have felt less enthused about his post. “Nobody talked to me about what our policies were in Germany,” Clay later recalled. “They just sent me over there. I did not want the job. After all, we were still fighting a war, and to be the occupying deputy military governor in a defeated area while the war was still going on in the Pacific was abo
ut as dead-looking an end for a soldier as you could find.”54 The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in their April 1945 directive (JCS 1067), envisaged that the American commander in Germany would wield “supreme legislative, executive and judicial authority” and instructed him to exercise his power in a manner that was “just but firm and aloof.”55 Clay could not wait to get rid of this unlooked-for responsibility. From the outset he planned that the military government would be short-lived; he aimed to cut his staff from twelve thousand to six thousand by February 1, 1946, and set July 1 as the target date for handing power over to a completely civilian government.56 Like Eisenhower, he believed that “the Government of Germany should, at the very earliest practicable moment, pass to a civilian organization.”57 But until this was possible, he argued, it was the job of the State Department, not the U.S. Army, to run the occupation.
After a reverse power struggle between the State and War departments, in which each side sought to pass the buck to the other, Truman fudged the issue by entrusting policy making to the former but leaving the administrative work to the latter.58 The argument nevertheless dragged on throughout 1947, with the State Department at length agreeing in principle to take over, only to dither over the practicalities; finally, in March 1948, Truman decided to leave Clay in charge. Throughout this period Clay struggled to retain good-quality officers in Germany, a task that was far from easy given the uncertain duration of army control.59 As he later reflected, “It was hard work, and it was not fun…. If we had not had our army officers to call on originally, and then to persuade them to stay as civilians, I do not think that we could ever have staffed the occupation.”60 The more expert Americans like George Shuster and George Kennan remarked on their colleagues’ ignorance of Germany’s culture, which often went hand in hand with the arrogance of the conqueror.61 Though more recent scholarship has been less harsh in its verdicts, the picture that emerges is, once again, scarcely that of an ideal occupation.62 What was planned did not happen. What happened was not planned. This was not so much an empire by invitation as an empire by improvisation.
A case in point was the policy of denazification. After four early stabs at the problem, the directive of July 7, 1945, alighted on the notion of “guilt by officeholding,” creating 136 mandatory removal categories; supplementary to this was Clay’s Law No. 8 of September 26, which decreed that former Nazis thus defined should be reemployed only in menial jobs. Yet as in Japan, so in Germany: to get rid of all the senior administrative personnel of the previous regime was a recipe for chaos. As early as the winter of 1945–46, the disruption caused by so many internments and demotions convinced Clay of the need to change tack.63 As he put it in March 1946, “With 10,000 people I couldn’t do the job of denazification. It’s got to be done by the Germans.”64 What this meant was an inundation of questionnaires, designed to get the Germans to rank themselves on a precisely calibrated scale of malfeasance: major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, followers, fellow travelers and (as the Germans joked) the “Persil white.” Clay later called denazification his “biggest mistake,” a “hopelessly ambigious procedure” that created a “pathetic ‘community of fate’ between small and big Nazis.”65 Comparably ambitious and ineffectual were the plans envisaged in JCS 1067 to establish “a coordinated system of control over German education and an affirmative program of reorientation … designed completely to eliminate Nazi and militaristic doctrines….”66 In fact, academic life swiftly reverted to its old, accustomed pattern. The professors who had once embraced nazism now embraced Nato-ism; most kept their jobs. The first important evidence of cultural change was the emergence of a liberal press, but that was as much the work of the occupied as the occupiers, whose role was essentially permissive.
The democratization of Western Germany was, without question, one of the great successes of American postwar policy. But it is important to recognize that it was driven forward in large measure by Clay’s desire to hand over power to a civilian authority as soon as possible. If the State Department refused to do the job, then once again it would have to be the Germans themselves. Although JCS 1067 had envisaged “the preparation for an eventual reconstruction of German political life on a democratic basis,” its bottom line was that, for the foreseeable future, “no political activities of any kind [would] be countenanced unless authorized.”67 The Americans in Germany, however, were positively impatient for German political activities to begin. In the first working session of the Allied Control Council (ACC) on August 10, 1945, they proposed the immediate creation of German central administrative institutions, headed by German state secretaries, to implement the general directives of the ACC.68 Fritz Schäffer, who had belonged to the conservative Bavarian People’s Party before 1933, was appointed prime minister of Bavaria within four weeks of V-E Day (though he was dismissed after just a few months). Parties were allowed to organize in the American zone almost at once, and as early as October 1945 Clay created a Council of Minister Presidents (Länderrat) in Stuttgart, to which he delegated a rapidly increasing number of adminis- trative responsibilities. By the end of 1945 all the new or reconstituted states (Länder) throughout the U.S. zone had German governments and “pre-parliaments.” In the first half of the following year, local governments were formed, and elections held, first locally and then, successively, at the level of Landkreis (district), city and finally state. By October all the American-controlled states had their own constitutions, which were approved by the military government and then by referenda; simultaneously, elections to the new state parliaments were held.69
In September 1946 Secretary of State James F. Byrnes made a speech in Stuttgart in which he stressed the American commitment to a rapid democratization of Germany:
It never was the intention of the American Government to deny to the German people the right to manage their own internal affairs as soon as they were able to do so in a democratic way, with genuine respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms…. It is the view of the American Government that the German people … under proper safeguards, should now be given the primary responsibility for the running of their own affairs…. It is our view that the German people should now be permitted and helped to make the necessary preparations for setting up a democratic German government…. While we shall insist that Germany observe the principles of peace, good-neighborliness, and humanity … the American people hope to see peaceful, democratic Germans become and remain free and independent…. The American people who fought for freedom have no desire to enslave the German people. The freedom Americans believe in and fought for is a freedom which must be shared with all willing to respect the freedom of others…. The American people want to return the government of Germany to the German people. The American people want to help the German people to win their way back to an honorable place among the free and peace-loving nations of the world.70
With those words he expressed a recurrent aspiration of American occupations before and since: the hope for a rapid transition from military rule to democratic self-government. Yet this hope could be fulfilled in Germany only because the Germans themselves could still recollect how democratic institutions functioned. After all, they had been shut down for just twelve years. Certainly, if the Germans had needed detailed instructions from Clay and his colleagues, they would have been disappointed. As Clay later admitted, “I did not have very much experience in the field [of democracy] myself, never having voted at that time. I came from a state where soldiers were not allowed to vote.” On one occasion, he, John Foster Dulles and a group of State Department officials “spent a whole day disagreeing on a definition of democracy. This was entirely within the American delegation. We could not agree on any common definition for democracy.”71 During discussions with the future German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Clay sought guidance from Washington on the subject of federalism but found he “could never get a strict definition for what they really intended to do to create a federal government.” He ruefully concluded: “I think we have a pecu
liar idea of our government being perfect without knowing really and truly how it works.”72
The leading historian of the American occupation of Germany has concluded that “the newborn West German government of 1949 … was conceived and delivered by the American Army,” but this was more out of expediency than democratizing expertise.73 In any case, it is important not to overstate the extent to which West Germany truly was democratized. Although the first elected West German government took over from the military government in the spring of 1949, the Occupation Statute enacted that year severely circumscribed the German politicians’ control over their own foreign and defense policy. It also reserved to the occupying forces the right “to resume … the exercise of full authority if they consider that to do so is essential to security or to preserve democratic government in Germany.”74
By contrast, the economic recovery of Germany happened with painful slowness. As in the case of Japan, this was largely because the initial thrust of postwar policy was either directly or indirectly to inhibit rather than stimulate growth—insofar as there was a coherent thrust at all. There was in fact a tension from the outset between the harshly retributive ideas for deindustrialization of Henry Morgenthau’s 1944 plan and the more pragmatic aims of the army reflected in its Handbook for the Military Government of Germany; nor was there any consensus among the departments of State, War and Treasury, to say nothing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.75 JCS 1067 was a compromise document, but it still retained elements of the Morgenthau Plan. Thus it formally instructed the military government to “take no steps (a) looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany, or (b) designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy.”76 Instead Clay should aim to “decentralize the structure and administration of the German economy to the maximum possible extent” and to “require the Germans to use all means at their disposal to maximize agricultural output.” At the same time, he was told “to ensure the production and maintenance of goods and services required to prevent starvation or such disease and unrest as would endanger occupying forces.”77 The result was a zone-wide SNAFU, as the testimony of numerous insiders like Harold Zink, Lewis Brown, and Carl Friedrich revealed in the later 1940s, when many of them returned to American universities to turn their experiences into dissertations.
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