Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  The crowd of onlookers, Americans for the most part, but also some curious Japanese on the edge of the scene, continued to grow. The first of MacArthur’s B-17 escorts landed, followed by the second three minutes later. Out of one stepped George Kenney and his staff; out of the other came General Carl Spaatz, head of the U.S. Strategic Air Force, and his aides.

  Everyone was shaking hands and relaxing, even laughing, when MacArthur noticed something. Both Spaatz and Kenney were carrying sidearms, .45 pistols as a standard part of combat dress.

  MacArthur shook his head. “Better leave the pistols behind,” he cautioned. “There are fifteen fully armed Jap divisions within ten miles of us. If they decide to start something, those toy cannons won’t do any good.”46

  Both generals put their guns back on their planes. Now all of them were standing, completely unarmed, on the runway surrounded by photographers, reporters, the Eleventh Airborne musicians, and a growing horde of curious passersby.

  Now what? Sutherland and Marshall looked at each other. The agreement reached in Manila was that the Japanese would provide MacArthur’s escort into Yokohama.

  Then from the edge of the airstrip there appeared the strangest assortment of antique automobiles that MacArthur, Kenney, and the others had ever seen. They looked like the car pool from a Harold Lloyd silent movie. In fact, they were practically the only drivable civilian transport left in Yokohama, but MacArthur had been insistent that no military vehicles were to be used in the lead-up to the surrender ceremony, either Japanese or American. The war was over. He and his staff would be arriving as guests of the Japanese people, not as conquerors.

  Still, someone pointed out, there was protocol to be observed. How about an honor guard for the supreme commander? So after a few minutes twenty troopers from the Eleventh Airborne were hustled up to act as honor guard, and they and MacArthur and the rest boarded the twelve-car motorcade.47

  MacArthur’s was an ancient Lincoln touring car, the one vehicle the staff judged the safest for him to drive. A rickety old fire engine led the way as the bizarre motorcade coughed and sputtered to life and finally drove off.

  It was a long trip. The road into Yokohama was heavily cratered from the incessant American bombing, and the cars in the motorcade constantly broke down. It took almost two hours to travel thirty miles.

  All around them was an empty landscape, an eerie silence, and an even eerier sight. The entire route to Yokohama was lined by Japanese soldiers—two divisions’ worth, some 30,000 men—standing stiffly erect at present arms at hundred-foot intervals, but with their backs turned to the road. At first Egeberg and the others were puzzled, but the explanation slowly began to dawn. The soldiers were there to make sure that no one took a potshot at the motorcade, including the soldiers themselves.48

  But there was also something happening, something that they learned about only later. This ceremonial salute was the kind of formal presentation of arms that the Japanese army usually reserved for the emperor himself.

  For the first time Egeberg, Sutherland, and the others felt sure they were going to live to see the end of the day.

  —

  Indeed, there was no untoward incident, at the airport, on the way to Yokohama, or later. MacArthur’s gamble was paying off.

  “General MacArthur knew he had the Emperor’s word and he trusted it,” Egeberg would write later, “trusted it as the Emperor’s honor and trusted the strength of the Emperor’s word to control the Japanese people, including their army.”49

  The trust was also starting to flow the other way. His decision not to arrive with sidearms had not gone unnoticed, and the Japanese responded to his gesture of faith with a sigh of gratitude and relief. Winston Churchill’s later verdict was that MacArthur’s arrival at Atsugi was the single most courageous act of the war. But the new head of SCAP knew what he was doing.

  “It was an exhibition of cool personal courage,” the Japanese historian Kazuo Kawai wrote later. “[I]t was even more a gesture of trust in the good faith of the Japanese. It was a masterpiece of psychology which completely disarmed Japanese apprehensions.”50

  The danger of a mass Japanese uprising against the American occupiers vanished from that moment on.

  —

  The destruction that MacArthur and his entourage found in Yokohama was shattering. Eighty percent of the city had been destroyed by Curtis LeMay’s B-29s, yet they could still clearly make out the streets and intersections. It turned out that most of Yokohama’s bombed buildings hadn’t had time to fall across a road; the mostly wooden structures had simply been scorched away in the firebombing, along with tens of thousands of their inhabitants.

  Even MacArthur was shaken. “It brings in to you the horror of war,” he told Egeberg, “total war. Those were civilians working and living there”—and now there was only a lifeless void.51

  Considering the obliteration surrounding it, their destination, Yokohama’s Grand Hotel, was remarkably intact. Built on a ridge along the waterfront, it had miraculously escaped the worst of the bombing. It was a square-built edifice in the European Art Deco style, with a dark, narrow lobby. Inside, the owner, an elderly Japanese gentleman in batwing collar and swallowtail coat, greeted his new tenants with a deep bow and offered the supreme commander a suite of rooms on the third floor. He also offered MacArthur a private room in which to dine (it was now early evening), but MacArthur said no, he would eat with his fellow officers.

  The meal was simple: beans, bread and butter, and some cold meat. Whitney wondered if MacArthur shouldn’t have someone taste the meat first, preferably someone Japanese. The general only laughed as he reached for his plate: “No one can live forever.”52

  That, too, was not lost on the Japanese who watched. Word got back to the hotel’s owner, who rushed to reappear at MacArthur’s elbow. He had heard from the hotel staff what had happened, he said, and he was “honored beyond belief.” MacArthur, too, was secretly pleased. The news of his small gesture of trust, like that of the sidearms, would get around. He knew they had done good work that day, building the bond on which the American occupation would be secured.53

  —

  He was able to take another step in building that trust that next morning. They all woke up to a day of pouring rain. General Swing of the Eleventh Airborne had to report that his men had found exactly one egg in the entire Yokohama area. MacArthur responded, It’s all right. From now on, he ordered, American forces will live on their own rations, not from civilian sources.

  “Willoughby tells me this country is close to starvation,” he told Egeberg. “They sorely need meat or fish or soybeans.” Instead of the Japanese having to feed their occupiers, as the orders from Washington had implied they should do—as was done with armies of occupation for centuries, even when MacArthur was in Germany in 1919—MacArthur was going to make sure the occupiers shared what they had with the Japanese. One of his top priorities, in fact, during the early days of the occupation would be steering army food stockpiles left over from the war to Japan to keep the country alive.54

  That next day, September 1, they drove into Tokyo.

  If anything, the destruction there was even more overwhelming and appalling. “Between seventy and eighty percent of the buildings had been destroyed, burned, bombed,” Egeberg remembered years later. Amid the ruins they spotted large water-tank affairs, also smashed and blackened. When Egeberg asked what they were, a foreign service officer said they’d been built and filled with water so that Tokyo residents could jump in them during firebombing raids. They hadn’t worked, the officer said. The people in them had simply been boiled to death in the intense heat.55

  They stopped at the American embassy, which was still habitable and almost exactly as Ambassador Joseph Grew had left it when it closed that Sunday in December 1941. Most impressive of all was the Imperial Hotel built by Frank Lloyd Wright in the twenties and standing out stark and straight from the surrounding moonscape. Not far away was the Dai-ichi insurance building, al
so still largely intact. It was there that MacArthur and his team decided they would set up his headquarters as Supreme Command of the Allied Powers, or SCAP—what would be the nerve center of the American occupation.

  They didn’t stop to see the Imperial Palace or pay a call on Emperor Hirohito. That, MacArthur had decided, could wait for another day. Instead they headed back to Yokohama for an event that, in his mind, was more important than confronting the broken deity who had led his people into a calamitous war and catastrophic defeat.

  Dinner that night at the Grand Hotel was more sumptuous than the previous night’s meal. There was a long table lined with Allied officers—Americans, British, Australians, Canadians, even a couple of Soviets—who were trying to chat amiably in this strange, foreign ambience, made stranger by uniforms they had never seen and talk about battles in places others had never known existed. At least the food was good: rice, fish, soup, vegetables, and steak. Egeberg was surprised at the steak. “We hadn’t brought it with us,” so it was clearly a Japanese gesture of hospitality.56

  Then suddenly an officer appeared at MacArthur’s side and murmured in his ear. All eyes became riveted on the door, as the general leapt from his seat and dashed for the lobby.

  There he found him.

  “He was haggard and aged,” MacArthur remembered later. “His uniform hung in folds on his fleshless form. He walked with difficulty and with the help of a cane. His eyes were sunken and there were pits in his cheeks. His hair was snow white and his skin looked like old shoe leather. He made a brave effort to smile as I took him in my arms, but when he tried to talk his voice wouldn’t come.”57

  It was Wainwright. After V-J Day no one, not even the Japanese, had any idea exactly where he was. Finally the Russians had located him in a prison camp near Mukden in Manchuria. When he heard the news from Henry Stimson, MacArthur was frantic to get Wainwright to Japan in time for the surrender ceremony.58 Getting him there had originally been George Marshall’s idea, but MacArthur enthusiastically signed on and suggested that British General Percival, who had surrendered Singapore to the Japanese a month before the fall of the Philippines, be there too.

  A CBS reporter was watching as the two men now met in the lobby of the Grand Hotel. “Without waiting for the formality of a salute,” as he described it, “General MacArthur grabbed Wainwright’s hand and put his arm around his shoulder in a half embrace.” There was more emotion in Douglas’s face than the reporter, who had covered him since New Guinea, ever remembered seeing there before.

  “Jim…Jim,” was all the usually eloquent MacArthur could say. It was the first time MacArthur had called him by his nickname, instead of Jonathan. “I’m glad to see you.” He held him to look at, hands on both shoulders and eyes moist, then embraced him again. A camera caught the moment. MacArthur with his arm around the friend and colleague he had been forced to abandon in the Philippines; Wainwright overcome with emotion at the sight of his former commander in chief.

  Then the moment was over. MacArthur led him into the dining room, where everyone rose and cheered and eyes teared and there were even shouts of “Skinny!”—Wainwright’s West Point nickname—under the circumstances a nickname tinged with sardonic, even grotesque, humor.

  They all sat down, with Wainwright at MacArthur’s elbow. MacArthur kept gazing at his long-lost subordinate; Wainwright conveyed a similar affection for his rescuer. Those who expected him to be bitter or distant toward the commander who had “abandoned” him and his men were due to be disappointed.

  They talked all through the meal. For four years, Wainwright confessed, he had expected a court-martial upon his release, for disobeying orders by surrendering. He certainly didn’t expect this, to be welcomed like a returning hero. He told MacArthur that he had never thought he’d be allowed a command again.

  “You can have any command you like,” Colonel Mashbir overheard MacArthur say. “What would you like?”

  “I want command of a corps,” Wainwright said in a barely audible voice. “Any one of your corps.”

  MacArthur said, “You can have any one you want. Why, Jim,” he said reassuringly, “your old corps is yours when you want it.”59

  Sadly, it wasn’t to be. Wainwright’s days in active service were numbered. His health broken, he was headed for retirement, not command. There was talk about a Medal of Honor—not for Bataan but for his endurance during four years of captivity. The fact that MacArthur had blocked the initial MOH recommendation would be conveniently forgotten.60 But for MacArthur, the reappearance of his old subordinate and that of General Percival, who had also been released from captivity, changed the mood. By ten o’clock he had left the party. The next day he moved into a large house near the harbor, where he could pace and think.

  The coming surrender ceremony weighed heavily on his mind. Everything had been planned down to the last detail, by Sutherland and a team from the United States Navy.61 But the speech he would give when it all was over would be his own. “I had received no instructions as to what to say or what to do,” even though it would be broadcast all around the world. “I was on my own…with only God and my own conscience to guide me.”62

  We know MacArthur wrote and rewrote the speech many times. We know he sought advice from a wide range of people, including his doctor, and surprisingly, took much of it.

  He knew that in some ways it would have to transcend his usual eloquence—an eloquence some found overblown. In some ways, it would have to be even bigger than he was. This speech would have to not only end a war but begin a peace—and a new era of reconciliation with Japan. It would be a major piece in the strategy at which his every move since arriving at Atsugi had aimed: helping to create a new Japan—even a new Asia—that acknowledged the value of the past, but also set a firm new direction for the future.

  The man who stood at the center of that strategy was the Japanese emperor, Hirohito. Nearly everyone in the Allied camp thought the man should be deposed; the British and Russians thought him a war criminal, and wanted him tried and executed as such. MacArthur had other plans for him. Hirohito would not be at the surrender ceremony; as he had been throughout the war, the emperor remained silent and ensconced in his Imperial Palace. But the two men would have to meet at some point in order for the American occupation—and the creation of a new destiny for Japan and Asia—to proceed. MacArthur was determined that he would have the upper hand at that meeting; and that it would set the tone for everything that unfolded afterward.

  Until that happened, however, there was still the surrender itself.

  * * *

  * In fact, Roxas would go on to become president of the Philippine Commonwealth and the first president of the new republic in 1946.

  CHAPTER 26

  BRIEF ENCOUNTERS

  Though I had defeated the Japanese in battle, I intended, by means of the concepts of a free world, to win them in peace.

  —DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

  MacArthur rose before five to sit down with his staff for a breakfast of bacon and eggs, toast and jam. There was a discussion of possible last-minute glitches and missing people and what to do if that happened. But as a whole, every movement in the next six hours had been meticulously choreographed by MacArthur and his staff, and at 7:20 they drove off in MacArthur’s car to see it done.

  It was a gray, overcast day and they drove in silence. MacArthur’s mind seemed far away, not just on the meaning of the surrender and what they had all been through, but on the next great drama to come.

  “Dick,” he asked suddenly, “are you meeting a representative of the emperor this afternoon?”

  Sutherland said he was.1

  Things were cold between them. After years of trust, Sutherland had ruined their relationship by his dalliance with Captain Clarke. When MacArthur discovered that Sutherland had brought her to Tanuan against his express orders, he had exploded in a rage at a level that no one had ever seen—even ordering Sutherland’s arrest.2 Captain Clarke had been sent packing back to Aus
tralia on Bataan II; Sutherland had been allowed to keep his job. But his days as part of MacArthur’s staff were numbered.

  Today, however, he had a vital role to perform, in overseeing the formal Japanese surrender ceremony on board the USS Missouri.

  At the pier MacArthur and Sutherland were met by an honor guard and a military band; then everyone boarded the destroyer Buchanan, where they met the others who were assembling like the cast of characters in a play. Jim Wainwright was there, looking happy but subdued. Ennis Whitehead and General Thomas White of the Fifth Air Force were there also, along with General Kenney and General Jimmy Doolittle, who had last been on the scene in a B-25 flying hell-for-leather at a low level over Tokyo Bay in April 1942—the first indication to the Japanese that this war was not going to go all their way.

  On their way out, there was a second breakfast and then everyone headed for the rail to watch as they approached the Missouri. Planes were constantly flying and circling overhead. The air seemed light and free despite the overcast skies, and then off the port side there appeared America’s most advanced battleship.

  It was “the most startling warship I had ever seen,” Wainwright remembered as they gazed up at the gray hull looming above them. “I simply could not believe anything could be so huge, so studded with guns.”3 MacArthur had chosen the battleship as the scene for the surrender in honor of the new president, Harry Truman, whose home state was Missouri.

  One by one they mounted the Missouri’s steps. Wainwright suddenly found himself greeted by a lusty cry of “Skinny!” He looked up. It was Admiral Bull Halsey, whom he had known since the early thirties and who now was pumping his hand and helping him up the ladder.

  In a few minutes the atmosphere on deck became that of a happy class reunion. A great circle of men in starched khakis were standing and chatting, men who came from thousands of miles apart to be together at this moment. There were Halsey and Admiral John McCain; Bob Eichelberger and Walter Krueger; and General Percival, the former British commander at Singapore, looking almost as drawn and emaciated as Wainwright himself.