Supreme Commander

by Seymour Morris, Jr.

  “Gentlemen, there’s no substitute for victory,” MacArthur told them in his closing remarks at the end of lunch. “You are here representing America!”

  MacArthur would not be at the Seals-Giants game. For a man who loved the limelight, this may seem strange. It is possible, however, to surmise an explanation from an incident that took place two years earlier. A Japanese newspaper had been about to publish an effusively flattering editorial about MacArthur when Willoughby had the article censored: “It was not in good taste.” At this important game and with all the cameras clicking, for a man as supreme as MacArthur to throw out the first ball and yell “Let the game begin!” would detract from the event itself. There are times when celebrity is not called for.

  Next day would be the opening ceremonies at Tokyo’s Korakuen Stadium. Representing MacArthur and SCAP would be Gen. William Marquat, the self-appointed commissioner of Japanese baseball. Cappy Harada was nervous; he knew the huge stadium would be packed to the roof. Tickets normally costing three hundred yen were going for as much as fifteen hundred to two thousand; scalpers were having a field day. Even the vendors were joining in, getting ready to sell Coca-Cola and American-style hot dogs. Harada went to MacArthur and asked if it would be appropriate to raise both the U.S. and Japanese flags before the commencement of the big game. Absolutely, said MacArthur, “Go ahead.”

  The U.S. national anthem was played first. As the Japanese anthem was played, Harada remained at attention and continued to salute. One of the colonels was so furious at Harada he went to the supreme commander after the game and demanded he be fired. “It’s OK,” MacArthur responded, “I told him to do it.” That was vintage MacArthur, a man who always stuck by his subordinates. “If it is right at the top, it will be right at the bottom,” he liked to say. By this he meant that because he had good people at the top the people at the bottom were good, too, because they would work hard to meet the high standards of their bosses.

  The U.S. Goodwill Baseball Tour of Japan was a rousing success, drawing a full crowd for each game. Recalled Lefty O’Doul:

  When I arrived it was terrible. The people were so depressed. When I had been in Japan before the war their cry had been “Banzai, Banzai.” But when I got there this time they were so depressed that when I hollered “Banzai” they didn’t respond at all. No reaction at all. Nothing. But when I left there, a few months later, all Japan was cheering and shouting “Banzai” again!

  The emperor was so pleased he invited O’Doul and the team officials to the Imperial Palace to personally thank them for everything they had done. MacArthur, not a man to get giddy, got excited over this one. “The greatest piece of diplomacy, ever,” he exulted. Move it up a notch, he told Harada. So back to San Francisco went Harada, to elicit the services of the great Joe DiMaggio, who had begun his career playing for Lefty O’Doul and the San Francisco Seals and was now a star of the New York Yankees. DiMaggio was delighted, and accepted. The following year, MacArthur brought him to Japan. The reception was tumultuous.

  A new bond, totally unexpected by the bureaucrats in Washington who could only wonder what the excitement was all about, had been established by a supreme commander who had an ear for the adoration of a crowd. Nothing touches the gut like a national sport, and baseball could be the one sport that evokes the concept of wa (group harmony) and the four principles of life practiced by the ancient samurai: doryoku, konjo, nintai, chowa (effort, fighting spirit, perseverance, and harmony). What better sport than baseball, MacArthur’s own at West Point?

  In 1951 Joe DiMaggio would return to Japan, this time with the Major League All-Star Team, and in 1954, when he married Marilyn Monroe (with O’Doul as best man), the place he chose for their honeymoon would be Japan.

  Anybody who thinks baseball isn’t the heart and soul of Japan should heed a Japanese newspaper poll of 1954. The newspaper asked its readers to list the most important people of the twentieth century. Babe Ruth came in higher than Douglas MacArthur.

  For MacArthur and Marquat, their encouragement of baseball had been fruitful. Beginning with the GIs who coached young kids from the start of the occupation, baseball had grown into a new form of diplomacy. One of the unique features of sports is the concept of equality: When two teams line up and face each other at the start of a game, they do so as equals. In Japan one bows. The Americans did. This respect for the other team in pursuit of excellence—something few other Allied countries were prepared to do at the time—won the Americans many friends.

  23

  Occupier as Protector

  FOR THE JAPANESE, MacArthur was not only their liberator from militarism, he was their protector. In his public message to the Japanese people on May 3, 1948, the anniversary of the Japanese constitution, he promised he would continue the transition of the occupation “from the stern rigidity of a military organization to the friendly guidance of a protective force.”

  One beneficiary of this new protective force was the emperor. Freed of weighty matters of state, he indulged in his pastime as an amateur marine biologist. He gave the supreme commander a signed copy of Dr. Kikutaro Baba’s recent book that undoubtedly filled a gap in MacArthur’s vast fount of knowledge. Titled Opisthobranchia of the Sagami Bay Region: Collected by His Majesty the Emperor of Japan, it contained a brief discussion and many paintings and drawings of specimens collected by the emperor of this large and morphologically diverse group of non-shell snails having the gills posterior to the heart.

  The Russians still were not cooperating with the 1945 repatriation agreement. MacArthur wouldn’t let them off the hook. By now it had become painfully obvious that the Russians were using these prisoners as slaves to perform hard labor and transferring the best of them to Moscow for indoctrination and “training.” In 1949 they sent 95,000 of these prisoners back home to operate as a fifth column. “A vast centrifugal machine,” MacArthur thundered, “designed to reconstruct the lives and political future of every prisoner within its scope.” In April 1950 the Russians announced the “completion” of Japanese repatriation from the Soviet Union, saying there were no more Japanese POWs remaining in their custody. Still unaccounted for, and presumably dead, were 310,000 Japanese prisoners in Soviet territories, plus another 60,000 in Manchuria. The only Russian concession to the international community was to put Japanese scientists from Pingfan on trial. MacArthur was less interested in the Russian trial at Khabarovsk than in knowing where the missing 370,000 Japanese were. No answer was forthcoming. On the subject of Pingfan, MacArthur had wanted Murray Sanders to go inspect the place, but had to cancel the trip when there was no plane available other than a B-29. The Russians controlled Pingfan, and America’s relationship with the Russians was so tenuous MacArthur couldn’t afford the risk of a B-29 falling into their hands and giving the Russians access to the B-29’s technology.

  While everyone focused on Russia and China, nobody was paying attention to the small neighbors. Yet it is small, chaotic areas—like the Balkans in World War I—that have the capacity to cause the greatest mischief. Another analogy might be the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the biggest threat to America’s mightily armed nuclear defenses came from a poverty-stricken offshore island taken over by Fidel Castro.

  THE YEAR 1950 began on a positive note. Indeed, it might have been cause for celebration. “Contemplating his handiwork, MacArthur found the miracle of the Occupation a source of constant wonder,” wrote the historians Richard Rovere and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The supreme commander, they imagined, was “often in a philosophical mood, pulling on his corncob pipe, letting his mind roam freely along the spacious reaches of history.”

  One cannot know what was going through MacArthur’s mind, but one thing we do know: He expected this would be his last year as supreme commander. The United States and Japan would sign a peace treaty, and he could finally go home. He was tired. For five years he had worked flat out, and now he looked forward to retiring and doing whatever he wanted, though like most workaholics he had no pla
n in mind. He hadn’t taken a vacation in nearly twenty years. Certainly he could look back with satisfaction on what had been accomplished. How Japan had changed! What had once been a desolate city of Tokyo was now a thriving metropolis bustling with well-dressed, well-fed people. The country was still poor, but it was free of the shackles of feudalism and moving forward. The sooner the Americans got out and let Japan make it on its own, the better. He understood how Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, like many Japanese, increasingly felt about the occupation. For Yoshida, the initials GHQ didn’t stand for General Headquarters, it stood for “Go Home Quickly!”

  MacArthur was annoyed that the president, the secretary of state, and the Joint Chiefs all wanted to rearm Japan and increase—not decrease—America’s footprint. He thought this was a great mistake. Together with Yoshida, he opposed any dramatic remilitarization of the country. As military commander of the entire Pacific in addition to his post as head of Japan, the supreme commander thought of the whole region—not just Japan. For Japan to have a large army, he said, would cause “convulsions” in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Japan should be “the Switzerland of the Pacific,” with an army only for self-defense. Back in the States, Gen. Robert Eichelberger, who had retired in 1948, was telling members of the Allied Council that a Japanese force of 150,000 men would be sufficient to confront Russia in case of war. This was the same Eichelberger who considered Japanese soldiers to be cannon fodder: “Dollar for dollar there is no cheaper fighting man in the world than the Japanese. He is already a veteran. His food is simple.” MacArthur had little tolerance for such condescension. Still, the ACJ and the National Security Council kept pushing for the supreme commander to create a massive “national police force.” Together with Yoshida, MacArthur stalled. To them, Article 9 of the Japanese constitution was sacrosanct. Back in America, John Foster Dulles argued for a Japanese force of 300,000 men; MacArthur refused. The Japanese people didn’t want an armed force; the Americans shouldn’t force them to do it. “Japanese rearmament is contrary to many of the fundamental principles which have guided SCAP ever since the Japanese surrender,” said MacArthur. “Abandonment of these principles now would dangerously weaken our prestige in Japan and place us in a ridiculous light before the Japanese people.”

  Japan was militarily secure. The supreme commander had kept the Russians at bay and had even managed to have cordial relations with General Derevyanko and his troublemakers. He had succeeded in holding off the Chinese seeking to bleed Japan with reparations demands, legitimate though their claims might be. He gave scant thought to this talk coming out of Washington about the “domino theory,” whereby the collapse of one country might lead to the collapse of neighbor countries. An issue of the Saturday Evening Post arrived on his desk in March 1950 featuring an article by the respected journalist Stewart Alsop, “We Are Losing the Far East”:

  The pin head was China. It is down already. The two pins in the second row are Burma and Indo-China. If they go, the three pins in the third row, Siam, Malaya and Indonesia, are pretty sure to topple in their turn. And if all the rest of Asia goes, the resulting psychological, political and economic magnetism will almost certainly drag down the four pins of the fourth row, India, Pakistan, Japan and the Philippines.

  MacArthur thought Alsop was talking nonsense. Asia was not like Europe, with countries packed closely together. The Asian countries were spread out over vast distances, often thousands of miles apart, many of them with distinct cultures and religions. To lump them together was wrong. The only thing they had in common was a history of colonialism under the British, the French, and the Dutch. A commission from Washington under the leadership of President Truman’s friend Robert Griffin, a newspaper publisher and much-decorated army officer, had toured the region recently and reported seeing a huge sign in Saigon: “Communism, No! Colonialism, Never!”

  The biggest threat to the region’s economic future was European colonialism, not Russian Communism. Communism was a danger, all right, but could be managed as MacArthur had done: by promoting workers’ rights. He had taken a big gamble. Even the State Department recognized that MacArthur had won his war with the Communists (just as he had with the FEC over the constitution and with the labor agitators over a national strike). In a letter to William Sebald, John M. Allison, director of the State Department’s Office of Northeast Asian Affairs, had written: “Everyone in the Department who has been connected with Japanese affairs has been impressed by the way General MacArthur has handled the Communist problem . . . [it] demonstrates that the Communist Party, given a certain amount of rope, can be its own hangman.” The holy grail of the occupation was in sight, the crown jewel in MacArthur’s diadem, the one thing the supreme commander sought more than anything else: a peace treaty. Since 1947 he had been pushing for it. The timing then had not been right, with many Americans still fearful of any resurgent Japanese militarism. With the rise of worldwide Communism in 1949, priorities had changed. Of all the countries in Asia, America’s most likely—and certainly most powerful—ally would be Japan. Knowing of his desire for a peace treaty, the Joint Chiefs had sent several delegations to Tokyo to persuade him to back off on his advocacy, with no success. His old friend Eichelberger, now back in America, had given a speech saying a peace treaty with Japan “would be disastrous to the United States in the Far East at this time.” Just as well that Eichelberger was retired and no longer working for him, otherwise the supreme commander would have personally strangled him.

  In June 1950 the supreme commander got a visit from a man who, had the Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey won the 1948 election, would have become secretary of state: John Foster Dulles. Truman, in a remarkable show of bipartisanship, had appointed Dulles to be his special emissary in charge of negotiating a peace treaty with Japan. It didn’t take long for MacArthur and his visitor to bond: Both were extremely moral, bright, highly egotistical, and in full agreement about the obsolescence of European colonialism. Most important of all, they shared a rabid abhorrence of war as a tool of statecraft. A peace treaty would drive that point home.

  During this visit Dulles met with Prime Minister Yoshida and repeated his request for allowing 300,000 American troops. Yoshida responded with stony silence. Dulles admitted the meeting had been a total failure. The next time he came to Japan, he would need all the help he could get. No way—tempting though it was—would he bully Japan. Dulles knew from his experience on the Reparations Commission at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference that strong demands would not work. Like MacArthur, no matter how frustrated he might be at times, he would treat the other side as an equal.

  WARS HAVE A way of beginning on a Sunday morning.

  On June 25, 1950, North Korea sent 90,000 soldiers across the border and routed the poorly trained 38,000 South Korean troops. The invasion was so abrupt that the first news Washington heard came not from military personnel or American foreign service officers in Korea, but from the United Press.

  Six months earlier, in January, Secretary of State Dean Acheson had publicly announced an “American defense perimeter” that excluded South Korea and Formosa. Considering how North Korea pounced on its neighbor after hearing this statement, it is easy to see how one historian would conclude that “delivering this speech was not the brightest idea Acheson ever had.” During his tenure as secretary of state, Acheson visited Europe eleven times, Asia not once. “The Korean attack had stirred us all up like a stone thrown into a beehive,” said George Kennan. “People went buzzing and milling around, each with his own idea of what we were trying to do. . . . Never before has there been such utter confusion in the public mind with respect to U.S. foreign policy. The President doesn’t understand it; Congress doesn’t understand it; nor does the public; nor does the press.”

  Nor, for that matter, did MacArthur. He, too, had paid little attention to Korea, though it fell within his sphere of responsibility. Possibly this was because he had too many jobs: SCAP, CINCFE (Commande
r in Chief, Far East), and CGFEC (Commanding General, Far East Command). He was responsible for the occupation of Japan, the deployment of U.S. troops in Okinawa and Taiwan, the use of Allied troops in Japan and Korea, and the U.S. naval and air forces stationed in the Far East. For most men, running Japan would have been job enough. On July 7, the UN passed a resolution establishing a unified military command under the United States (some eighteen countries would join the coalition). The following day President Truman appointed Douglas MacArthur to the position of CINUNC, Commander in Chief, United Nations Command. MacArthur, the only five star-general to receive the Medal of Honor, now had another “first” on his glittering résumé: commander of a United Nations force. “Mars’ last gift to an old warrior,” he called it.

  Consistently in his term as supreme commander for Japan, MacArthur had demonstrated a remarkable ability to be ahead of Washington in his strategic thinking. Concerning Korea, however—a country he had never visited—he was woefully ignorant. The United States had a Korea expert, Dr. Arthur Bunce, a State Department economic advisor to the military government in Seoul, who had spent six years in Korea before World War II and after. In 1947 Bunce contacted his superior in Tokyo, George Atcheson, and told him that the right wing, headed by the corrupt Syngman Rhee, was losing the support of the people. To save the situation it was essential for the supreme commander to come to Korea right away and “use his prestige and influence” to help the middle-of-the-road politicians. MacArthur never bothered to come.

  His sole concern was Japan. Korea was just another spot on the map. He wanted nothing to do with it: “I wouldn’t put my foot in Korea. It belongs to the State Department. They wanted it and got it. . . . The damn diplomats make the war and we win them. Why should I save their skin?” Like Dean Acheson, he thought America’s defense perimeter ran through Japan and should not touch the Asian mainland. In 1950 there was a compelling reason for such a policy: no money. America’s defense budget, under attack by members of Congress, was stretched super-thin, with not a dollar to spare for outposts of marginal utility. Truman was president, not Eisenhower or Kennedy, with their visions of American military power and global responsibilities. Said George Marshall, despairing that there were not enough troops to contain the Soviet Union: America was “playing with fire when we have nothing with which to put it out.”