Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  The men locked in the conference room at the White House were not so sanguine. Truman had watched U.S. casualties on Okinawa swell to 70,000 in less than eighty days; this conflict would be against a much more numerous and more desperate foe. He wanted a reassurance from the Joint Chiefs that the invasion of Kyushu wouldn’t degenerate into a bloody race war, pitting white American soldiers against Japanese civilians in an endless fight to the death. None could give it.

  Marshall, meanwhile, was making his own calculations based on MacArthur’s experience on Luzon, and guessed that casualties would run about 1,000 a day, assuming that the Japanese had eight divisions on the island. Admiral Leahy was also doing his numbers, which pointed to a quarter million casualties overall.

  There was dead silence in the room. Every person was thinking, Even after we complete the conquest of Kyushu at that bloody rate, there will still be Honshu. This, in fact, had been the most chilling revelation from ULTRA: far from being discouraged by defeat after defeat, the Japanese war chiefs were determined to fight on. In the words of historian Kenneth Drea, ULTRA “showed that [Japan’s] military leaders were blind to defeat and were bending all remaining national energy to smash an invasion of their divine islands.”21

  If MacArthur had been there, of course, he would have exerted all his remaining energy to lift the growing veil of gloom. He would have called Leahy’s estimates absurdly high; he would have pointed out that intelligence strongly suggested that the Japanese were only strong enough to try to blunt one prong of his offensive on Kyushu. The other two were bound to get through.22 Besides, he would have reminded them, the goal wasn’t complete conquest of the island, only enough to provide airfields and staging areas for the final push to Honshu and Tokyo. Given the Allies’ complete air and naval supremacy, the Japanese would be helpless to prevent the next and last stage of DOWNFALL.

  What MacArthur did not know was that Truman already had another option.

  —

  Everything hinged on what happened on a stretch of New Mexico desert near a former convent known as Los Alamos. On June 28 MacArthur announced that all of Luzon had been liberated. Eighteen days later Truman learned that the test at Los Alamos had been successful. On July 25 he gave his approval to dropping one atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and if Japan did not then surrender, another on the city of Nagasaki.

  There were many strategic reasons behind Truman’s decision. But the steady buildup of Japanese forces on Kyushu, MacArthur’s next destination, was one of the most important. Even as the Enola Gay was taking off from Tinian with its deadly cargo, a new ULTRA decrypt confirmed two more new divisions on Kyushu, raising the final estimate of the number of Japanese soldiers on the island to 560,000.23

  That final report was dated August 7. The day before, the entire war—indeed, the entire history of warfare—had changed at Ground Zero at Hiroshima.

  —

  MacArthur learned what had happened from a copy of Stars and Stripes that same day. He had been in Manila almost a month, overseeing the United States’ occupation and the transition to Philippine rule—and preparing for OLYMPIC in the autumn. A hospital had been set up in Manila of 30,000 beds, including a large psychiatric unit (troops on Okinawa had suffered more than 25,000 mental breakdowns). It was a chilling reminder of what the ultimate cost of the landing might be.24

  The last days in June, he had gone off to watch the Australians in action one last time—the last amphibious landing of World War Two. It had been at the big oil terminal at Balikpapan, where the Australian Seventh Division splashed ashore in a nightmare landscape, with exploding oil-storage tanks filling the sky with belching black smoke and fiery red flames. It was a fitting Wagnerian scene with which to end the war in the Southwest Pacific, and the operation that achieved MacArthur’s objectives of cutting Japan off, at last, from its vital supply of oil.

  But it came too late to make a strategic difference. MacArthur was still operating under the assumption that he would be launching OLYMPIC in a few weeks, when he saw the headline in Stars and Stripes: ATOM BOMB DROPPED. His staff watched as he read over the story, slowly and carefully, then mounted the stairs to his office. On the way, he took the paper and read the story again.

  “That’s far beyond anything you can imagine,” he murmured to his staff.25

  “The development of nuclear weapons had not been revealed to me until just before the attack on Hiroshima,” MacArthur wrote in his memoirs.26 To his credit, his first thoughts were not about how he had been left out of the loop (although later he expressed anger that General Eisenhower had been informed of the Manhattan Project weeks before he was told of it), but what the impact would be on the Japanese war effort. He told an informal gathering of reporters that same day: “The war may be over sooner than some think. Things are in such a state of flux that anything can happen. The Japanese already are beaten, but their leaders hang on in the hopes of some break that will save them.” Now the biggest break of all had doomed those hopes.

  His remarks had been off-the-record, but to Doc Egeberg he was more direct.

  “This will end the war,” he said confidently. “It will seem superhuman—almost supernatural—and will give the Emperor and the Japanese people a face-saving opportunity to surrender. You watch, they’ll ask for it pretty quick.”27

  Six days later his prediction proved correct. A Manila radio broadcast announced that Japan had accepted the Allies’ terms for surrender. Hundreds of jubilant GIs gathered outside MacArthur’s second-story office window and called for him to come out.

  The MacArthur who appeared at the window was visibly moved, barely able to speak to the men he had led on the 3,000-mile journey from Brisbane through New Guinea and the Solomons to Manila.

  “I hope from the bottom of my heart that this is the end of the war,” he finally said. “If it is, it is largely due to your own efforts. Very soon, I hope, we will all be going home.” Then he left as abruptly as he had appeared.28

  The next day, August 12, MacArthur learned that he had been appointed by Truman—with Attlee, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek’s approval—as supreme commander of the Allied powers in Japan or (SCAP), which meant he would oversee the occupation of Japan. He would also be the presiding officer at the formal surrender ceremony in Tokyo. Once again, there was no possible other choice. And perhaps it was compensation for the man who had just been denied the chance to command the greatest seaborne invasion in history.

  On August 19 a delegation of Japanese arrived to negotiate the final terms of occupation. MacArthur refused to meet them; instead he left negotiations to Sutherland, Marshall, and the others on his staff. That took most of the night and a good deal of the next day. The Japanese were particularly miffed that the surrender document treated Emperor Hirohito without sufficient dignity. This was a matter of “extreme importance” to the Japanese people, they insisted; it might make the difference between the Japanese resisting the occupation, in spite of the surrender, rather than “enduring the unendurable,” as the Emperor had asked them to in his post-surrender radio broadcast.

  Sutherland took the matter to MacArthur. He agreed. “I have no desire whatever to debase him in the eyes of his own people,” he told Sutherland. “[T]hrough him it will be possible to maintain a completely orderly government.”

  Already a strategy for dealing with a completely defeated nation, and its hitherto divine leader, was taking shape in his mind.29

  It was also agreed that the first Americans would land at Atsugi air base, fifteen miles west of Yokohama, and that MacArthur himself would arrive there after a stopover on Okinawa, on August 26 (a series of typhoons sweeping through the area later forced them to change that date to August 30). There was no other location in Japan, the Japanese implied, where they could ensure MacArthur’s safety—and even there, where thousands of kamikaze trainees were stationed, there was no guarantee there wouldn’t be trouble.

  MacArthur waved those worries aside. He had little to say
that evening on the way home. His mind was filled with the plans for occupation, for demobilizing the Japanese army and beginning the process of rebuilding a shattered land and a defeated people. As he and Egeberg got out of the car, he simply remarked:

  “No more shooting, Doc, no more shooting. Good night.”30

  Then he went in to tell Jean the news.

  —

  It was time to fly.

  August 30, 1945, dawned clear and bright on Okinawa as MacArthur, Sutherland, and the others boarded Bataan II, the Douglas C-54 Skymaster successor to the B-17 that MacArthur had flown since 1942. At 9:00 A.M. precisely they took off and headed north. They were flying toward the Japanese mainland, with no more protection than a pair of B-17s escorting them. They were headed directly into what had been, barely two weeks before, the heart of the enemy’s homeland—a trip three weeks before would have been unimaginable.

  They were supposed to fly in the day before, with plans to land at Atsugi air base outside Yokohama. The Japanese had put them off and pleaded bad weather, but the truth was there had been a dustup. Atsugi had been a principal training base for kamikaze pilots; there were more than 30,000 of them still at the base or nearby. Army officials worried that some or all might rebel at the arrival of Americans, their mortal enemy for nearly four years—a rebellion that might trigger a national catastrophe.

  The scenario was not so far-fetched. The very day that Hirohito had made his surrender speech, a team of army fanatics had swept into the Imperial Palace grounds, determined to cut off the broadcast. They had even killed the commanding general of the Imperial Guard, General Takeshi Mori, and burned down the prime minister’s house before they were finally subdued.31

  As it was, officials at Atsugi had to deal with nearly the same thing. They tried removing the propellers from the kamikaze planes to prevent them from taking off to intercept MacArthur. The fanatical young kamikazes fought back. Japanese troops had to open fire to put down the revolt.32

  For all these reasons, Japanese officials had insisted that MacArthur mustn’t land at Atsugi. So did his staff. As they pressed their case, MacArthur paced back and forth listening and thinking. He knew the stakes were high if something went wrong. In addition to the rebellious kamikazes at Atsugi, there were more than 150,000 Japanese soldiers in the Kanto plain of Tokyo, close to Yokohama. At the slightest outbreak of an incident—or a last-minute order from an officer they trusted—they would descend on the Americans and wreak havoc.

  But MacArthur refused to budge. All the same, his doctor, Egeberg, could see he was ill at ease, thinking through the issues of postponing his arrival.

  “For the supreme commander,” as he summed it up years later, “a handful of his staff, and a small advance staff to land unarmed and unescorted where they would be outnumbered by thousands to one was foolhardy. But,” he went on, “years of overseas duty had me well versed in the lessons of the Orient.” Not to go would be a major loss of face; in addition, “what was probably more important,” he had to reinforce the perception that he took the Japanese surrender at its word and would not back down no matter how many soldiers were still there.33

  They were going forward.

  At least the flight from Okinawa was on schedule.34 In minutes they were airborne, banking up and north, toward Japan.

  The mood was tense, alternately ebullient and anxious. Only a short time after takeoff the ocean dropped away, and land began to appear first on their port side, then straight ahead. Then MacArthur roused himself and began pointing out landmarks along the southern beaches of Honshu.

  He knew this terrain well, if only from maps. If it hadn’t been for the atomic bomb, troops from Eichelberger’s Eighth Army and Lieutenant General John Hodge’s XXIV Corps would have been landing on these beaches just eight months from that very day, as part of Operation CORONET.

  Was MacArthur grateful for the atomic bomb? In fact, then and later MacArthur believed use of the bomb “was completely unnecessary from a military point of view,” and that if the Potsdam July 26 ultimatum had included assurances that the emperor would not be removed or harmed, the Japanese would have capitulated there and then.35

  Historians are free to disagree; but if the Japanese had not surrendered after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, MacArthur was quite prepared to go ahead with his DOWNFALL invasion plan, heavy casualties and all.

  “Let me know when we get close to Mount Fuji,” he told his pilot, Dusty Rhoades, and then headed aft.

  Time for a nap, MacArthur had decided. It was going to be a long day, and he wanted to be as fresh as possible.36

  As he dozed, the staff talked quietly among themselves. The land swept away below them, as they drew nearer and nearer to Yokohama and their destination. What was going to be awaiting them as they landed? MacArthur had heard reports that when the first U.S. troops arrived, 150 engineers and technicians, the “reception by Japanese was entirely correct.” There were even pitchers of orange juice and rice wine to greet the first representatives of the American forces.37

  But what would be the greeting for the American supreme commander once he was on Japanese soil—and completely cut off from his forces? “The war had started without a formal declaration,” Courtney Whitney was thinking. “The usual rules of war had not been complied with; deadly traps had frequently been set. Here was the greatest opportunity for a final and climactic act,” the assassination of the SCAP himself as he arrived at the Atsugi airport.

  If that was the Japanese plan, there would be no Americans to prevent it from happening.

  “I held my breath,” Whitney remembered as they banked toward Yokohama, adding with only the slightest exaggeration, “I think the world held its breath.”38

  Dusty Rhoades came back from the cockpit and woke MacArthur up. Something you should see, sir, he said with a reassuring grin. MacArthur went forward.

  There dead ahead was a great blue cone rising up from the landscape, capped with white. It was Mount Fuji.

  “Beautiful!” Mac murmured. There wasn’t far to go now.39

  As the plane approached the mouth of Tokyo Bay, the passengers on Bataan II could glimpse an even more breathtaking sight.

  It was the entire American Pacific Fleet, 280 ships drawn up in formation, waiting for the formal surrender ceremony. There were carriers by the dozen, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers: without doubt the single greatest armada in modern history.

  Somewhere down there was Chester Nimitz, MacArthur realized. Nimitz had been his rival for command, and for a winning strategy, along with Nimitz’s boss, Admiral King. In fact, Nimitz and MacArthur had gotten on better than many in the navy had expected. It was King who had retained the most bitter feelings toward MacArthur personally and had been his principal opponent in more than three and a half years of war.40

  Yet on two of the most crucial decisions of the Pacific war, the encirclement of Rabaul and the invasion of the Philippines, King had given way to MacArthur and Marshall, and allowed his judgment to be overruled. Now they were all partners in the final defeat of Japan. And in a few days, MacArthur knew, they would be standing side by side as friends at the Japanese surrender ceremony—just as he and Dick Sutherland had planned it.

  His mind, meanwhile, was racing with the job he now had to do. Courtney Whitney could hear him muttering to himself as he paced the length of the plane, planning in his mind the agenda to transform Japan.

  “First destroy the military power…then build the structure of representative government,” he was saying. “Enfranchise the women…liberate the farmers…Establish a free labor movement…Encourage a free economy…Develop a free and responsible press…Liberalize education…”41

  Bataan II steadily lost altitude as the ground rushed up toward them. They slowly circled Atsugi at little more than treetop level. Whitney could plainly make out antiaircraft batteries scattered around the field, which only increased his worries. All it would take was one deadly accurate burst, and the whole adventure would be over.<
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  Then it was wheels down as Bataan II swooped down toward the field. The landing was unsteady—“rubbery,” one eyewitness said—but then the plane came to a halt and Dusty shut down the engines one by one.42

  The cabin door opened. Steel steps with a railing clattered down to the concrete runway. MacArthur calmly lit his pipe and stepped out.

  Overhead the sky was bright blue, with a few splotches of cloud. A beautiful day. It was the first time MacArthur had set foot on Japanese soil since he had visited the country as a young lieutenant forty years earlier—but now setting that foot was like satisfaction of a vow, and as sweet as victory.

  There was no time to savor the moment in solitude. Cameras started clicking and whirring from the instant he emerged from the plane, and standing in front of him was General Eichelberger, along with the marching band of the Eleventh Airborne Division. They and a couple of thousand paratroopers had flown in a few hours earlier, just to secure the landing site, and now as the band struck up a march, Eichelberger strode forward and saluted.

  “Bob, this is the payoff,” MacArthur said with a grin. “From Melbourne to Tokyo is a long way, but this seems to be the end of the road.”43

  Eichelberger gave back a tense smile. He knew it could be the end of the road in more ways than one. Although he had full faith in his paratroopers and although the Japanese had behaved well so far, he knew standing on that runway he and MacArthur and the other Americans were outnumbered thousands to one. All it would take was “one undisciplined fanatic” to “turn a peaceful occupation into a punitive expedition,” he remembered later, and MacArthur’s triumphant landing into a bloodbath.44

  But MacArthur wasn’t worried. He smiled as the band played on. “Thank you very much,” he called out to the bandleader. “I want you to tell the band that’s about the sweetest music I’ve ever heard.”45