And there was Chester Nimitz. He was piped aboard the Missouri from another destroyer, and he and MacArthur had their first face-to-face meeting since the Japanese surrender in the admiral’s cabin.
MacArthur’s manner was friendly and matter-of-fact with everyone, but his face was tense. His doctor could see that he wanted to be alone. MacArthur had another, more pressing mission. He caught Dusty Rhoades’s eye, signaled him to follow him, and left for the captain’s head, or bathroom. With Rhoades guarding the door, MacArthur entered and closed the door. Rhoades could hear him retching inside. That old nervous reaction was back, the one that had nearly paralyzed him before his entrance exam for West Point and had him throwing up on the steps of the White House as army chief of staff.4
Rhoades asked him if he wanted a doctor.
“No, I’ll be all right in a moment,” MacArthur firmly replied.
Then he walked out, turned, and strode toward the deck.
There was history to be made.
—
The surrender was set to take place on the Missouri’s veranda deck, number two gun turret. The assemblage included British, Dutch, Chinese, Russian, and American officers, all in a bewildering variety of uniforms—while the battleship’s entire complement, some 1,100 men, watched from every turret, stair, and vantage point they could find. There was also a microphone, where MacArthur would speak as he oversaw the ceremony—and explain to Americans everywhere by radio hookup not just what was happening, but what it meant.
“Was the day beclouded by mists or trailing clouds?” MacArthur wrote later. “I cannot remember but this I do—the all embracing pride I felt in my country’s monumental victory.”
Overhead was the flag that had flown from the United States Capitol on December 7, 1941. MacArthur had arranged that another flag be there as well: Commodore Matthew Perry’s pennant from his visit to the same Tokyo Bay in 1853. MacArthur was a direct descendant of Commodore Perry’s family, a distant cousin of the American who ninety-two years earlier had first tried to change Japan’s ways at the point of a gun. Perry’s “purpose was to bring to Japan an era of enlightenment and progress, by lifting the veil of isolation to the friendship, trade, and commerce of the world,” MacArthur would say later. “But alas the knowledge thereby gained of western science was forged into an instrument of oppression and human enslavement.”5 MacArthur was determined not to let that happen again.
The tide of world affairs may ebb and flow, he was thinking, old empires may die, new nations be born; alliances may arise, thrive, wither, and vanish. “But in its effort to build economic growth and prosperity, an atmosphere of hope and freedom, a community of strength and unity of purpose…my own beloved country now leads the world.”6 After all the sacrifice in two world wars, MacArthur could embrace that proposition with pride.
Then everyone’s excitement turned to high tension. The word was out: the Japanese officials were arriving on board. Heads swiveled to watch the ladder where they would be coming up from the deck below.
“Suddenly the major part of a silk hat appeared,” Doc Egeberg remembered, “then almost disappeared.” Then the hat again, this time with a face: that of Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, in formal hat and cutaway coat.7
No senior Japanese official had wanted to be there. All of them considered signing the surrender document a humiliation; they would rather die, they said, than be part of it. So at the last minute the emperor had to give the order to Shigemitsu, who had accepted as an act of duty and honor to his emperor regardless of the humiliating circumstances. “We must endure the unendurable,” Hirohito had told his people the day he announced Japan’s surrender. For Shigemitsu, this was his part.
Then came General Yoshijiro Umzedu, chief of the general staff. He had threatened to commit hara-kiri rather than go to the ceremony on the Missouri until the emperor’s express order forced him to suppress his feelings.8 Coming with him were six other officers and two civilians.
Both of the civilians were foreign ministry officials. One, Katsuo Okazaki, had been consul general of Hong Kong when the war broke out. The other was Toshikazu Kase, who happened to be a graduate of Amherst and Harvard and had been added to the entourage at the last minute.
It had not been a pleasant journey for them. First, they had had to thread their way through the devastation of Tokyo, then sail through the harbor past line after line of American warships, “the mighty pageant of the Allied navies,” Kase remembered in a flight of poetry, “that so lately belched forth their crashing battle, now holding in their swift thunder and floating like calm sea birds on the subjugated water.” Nearly two hundred and sixty warships, to be exact, but no aircraft carriers. Those were on alert farther out at sea, in case the Japanese changed their minds at the last minute.
There was a strange moment as the Japanese delegation, all now on deck, moved toward the dais. Foreign Minister Shigemitsu spotted a Canadian doctor in the crowd—the same doctor, as it happened, who had saved his life in Shanghai in the1930s when a bomb had cost the Japanese diplomat his leg. Shigemitsu smiled and almost waved. Then he caught himself, and moved on.
All stood solemnly as a navy chaplain read a brief prayer. Then a windup phonograph played a tinny rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the crew and officers of the Missouri all watching from every deck and gallery.
As the music played, Toshikazu Kase glanced at his fellow Japanese. He thought they looked like penitent schoolboys waiting for the stern headmaster. “There were a million eyes beating us in the million shafts of a rattling storm of arrows barbed with fire,” he remembered. “I felt their keenness sink into my body with a sharp physical pain. Never have I realized that the glance of glaring eyes could hurt so much.”9
Then MacArthur stepped forward to the microphone and the mood changed.
“We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers,” he began in his dark, husky voice, “to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored.” His hand was shaking, his forehead sweating. The moment was heavy on everyone’s mind, so much so that few noticed at first the words he had chosen. Not “unconditional surrender of Japan” but “restoration of peace.” But Kase, who understood English, did.
“It is my earnest hope,” MacArthur went on, “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….As Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, I announce it my firm purpose, in the tradition of the countries I represent, to proceed in the discharge of my responsibilities with justice and tolerance, while taking all necessary dispositions to insure that the terms of surrender are fully, promptly and faithfully complied with.”
Peace restored; justice and tolerance; also faith and understanding. It seemed a very unusual way to proclaim victory after the bloodiest, bitterest conflict in history, especially one in which Japanese and Americans had hunted each other like jungle animals in the mountains of New Guinea, the caves of Pelelieu and Iwo Jima, and the alleyways of Intramuros. It had been a war without mercy, without pity or understanding, or so it seemed.
Then the ceremony began.
The Japanese delegates stepped forward to the table to sign the surrender documents. One set was bound in dark green leather. That was the American copy. The other was in a cheap black binding. That was Japan’s. Shigemitsu put his silk hat and white gloves on the table, but then seemed confused what to do next.
MacArthur’s voice rang out like a shot. “Sutherland, show him where to sign.”10
A grim-faced Sutherland did, with an extended forefinger. Then General Umzedu signed for the Japanese military, and MacArthur called on Wainwright and Percival to step forward and bear witness as MacArthur himself signed.
He sat at the table and from his pocket extracted six pens. Six pens to sign, six pens to remember the moment forever.
One for the National Archives. One for West Point. One for the Naval Academy at Annapolis, a gesture to
the navy.
One was for Jim Wainwright, and one for Percival, emblems of the final removal of the shame of surrender.
The last one was a small red pen with an inscription in gold letters that read simply, “Jean.”
MacArthur then rose, and it was the turn of the other Allied representatives. Chester Nimitz was first, then representatives of China, the United Kingdom, the USSR, Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and New Zealand.
When all had signed, MacArthur had the last word. “Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always,” he intoned.
“These proceedings are closed.”
Then a roar went up—not cheering, but hundreds of planes, including 400 B-29s in formation overflight and1,500 navy planes, the greatest overflight in history. The day had started under a heavy overcast; planners had wondered if the overflight would have to be canceled. But as the signing ceremony ended, the skies mysteriously cleared and the sun peeked out over Tokyo Harbor. And so the American planes, the instruments of final victory, flew over the scene, the shadow of their wings passing over the blackened remains of Tokyo.11
—
“Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won.”
It was MacArthur speaking to the American public in a radio broadcast from the deck of the Missouri after the signing ceremony had ended. He was finally delivering the speech he had written and rewritten in the days after the fighting had ended.
“A new era is upon us,” he said. “Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concept of war.”
Peace, MacArthur said, could now be attained only by a change of heart and spirit, as well as alliances and balance of power. Then he spoke of Japan.
“We stand in Tokyo today reminiscent of our countryman Commodore Perry ninety-two years ago. His purpose was to bring to Japan an era of enlightenment and progress by lifting the veil of isolation to the friendship, trade, and commerce of the world.” Now, MacArthur believed, in the aftermath of total victory America had that chance to set Japan’s and Asia’s hearts and minds free from a brutal, oppressive past.
The dream of America’s role in Asia that his father had unveiled more than sixty years earlier would finally be realized.
“We are committed by the Potsdam Declaration of Principles to see that the Japanese people are liberated from this condition of slavery. It is my purpose to implement this commitment…If the talents of the [Japanese] race are turned into constructive channels, the country can lift itself from its present deplorable state into a position of dignity.”
That was why MacArthur had brought Perry’s flag to the surrender ceremony, not as a banner of triumph but as a pledge of hope—a pledge, he believed, that extended not just to Japan but to all the peoples of Asia, whose “unshackled peoples are tasting the full sweetness of liberty, the relief from fear,” he concluded.12
But he would start in Japan. His model would be what his father and others, including himself, had tried to do for the Philippines. The fostering of democratic institutions, the inculcation of the idea of individual rights and equal opportunity, of the rule of law, even the encouragement and spread of Christianity—in MacArthur’s mind these would be the hallmarks of his work with the Japanese people. He was firmly convinced he and the Americans would replace iniquity and fanaticism with the spirit of charity and truth.
How would the Japanese themselves react? In Toshikazu Kase’s case, standing on deck in his morning suit and listening and watching behind his thick glasses, his mood had undergone a radical shift.
“Is it not a piece of rare good fortune, I asked myself, that a man of such caliber and character should have been designated as the Supreme Commander who will shape the destiny of Japan? In the dark hour of our despair and distress, a bright light is ushered in, in the very person of General MacArthur.”13
MacArthur’s last words, however, were for his soldiers, sailors, and airmen.
“Their spiritual strength and power has brought us through to victory. They are homeward bound—take care of them.”
—
Many, of course, were not going home. They would be the occupation forces under MacArthur’s command, who would see to the dismantling of the still-formidable Japanese war machine in Japan and across its former empire—and to maintaining peace and order if civil society collapsed.
That seemed likely, if not certain. The Japanese and the people they had conquered had suffered death, starvation, and epidemic disease during the course of this war, the most destructive Asia had ever witnessed. An estimated seventeen million people had died at the hands of the Japanese, almost all of them noncombatants. Japan itself had lost nearly five million people. In addition, there were deep resentments and social divisions within Japan itself—between rich and poor, workers and industrialists, Western-educated urbanites and a Japanese army drawn from poor rural areas—which had been kept under iron clamp by the military regime for decades, but which were now free to surge to the surface.
“After this terrible fury,” as historian John Dower states, “Japan entered a strange seclusion”—one from which it could emerge whole or bitterly resentful toward the victors, much as Germany had done after World War One.14
In short, if MacArthur and the Americans made a single serious misstep, the result could be chaos—and not just in Japan.
—
Five days after the Missouri ceremony, the port of Inchon on the Korean peninsula had a visitor. He was a lean, hard-faced man dressed in starched fatigues and a battered American officer’s cap. Lieutenant General Hodge and his troops of XXIV Corps had been ordered there to disarm Japanese troops on the peninsula and to maintain law and order.
Despite the ecstatic cheers that greeted Hodge and his men as they marched from Inchon to the city of Seoul, he sensed that his task was not going to be easy. Korea’s last independent government had ended in 1910, when it had been swallowed up by the Japanese empire. Now with the Japanese surrender, virtually every trace of civil authority had collapsed. Nationalist groups of all political stripes were surging around Seoul, the old Korean capital, all claiming to represent the Korean people and all demanding that they, not their rivals, be put in charge of a future independent Korea.
Koreans could be tough, outspoken, and brusque. Now they were also seething with impatience. Behind the ecstasy of liberation was a tense atmosphere of latent violence, even civil war.
Hodge was a soldier’s soldier, who had fought his way from Guadalcanal and Bougainville, where he had commanded a division before leading the XXIV Corps in the fierce fighting on Leyte and at Okinawa. Now he had a very different job: governing a foreign people after their liberation from a brutal colonial ruler. He was going to have to be part statesman, part judge and arbitrator, part economist, and part policeman—all the skills that had come naturally to the MacArthurs, father and son, but for which Hodge was in no way prepared.
Still, as he gazed at the American flags waving at him from the happy throngs in Seoul, he knew there was one headache he didn’t have to deal with. A month before he arrived and days after Russia declared war on Japan in August, thousands of Russian troops had poured into Manchuria and Korea. They had ruthlessly hacked their way down the peninsula and had gotten as far as Seoul and then Inchon, before the Japanese surrender. Postwar planners back at the Pentagon had worried that this left no clear line of jurisdiction between American and Russian occupation forces—and also worried that if the Russians overran the entire peninsula, the Americans would never get in at all.
For administrative purposes “we have got to divide Korea,” one of them, a brigadier general said. “Where can we divide it?”
They were all gazing at a map of a country thousands o
f miles away that none of them had ever visited—none, that is, except one of the colonels standing around the table. He had visited Korea several times and protested that no one could really divide the country. Geographically, linguistically, culturally, and economically, it formed a single unit.
The harassed general answered, “We’ve got to divide Korea, and we’ve got to do it by four o’clock this afternoon.”
Then a young captain who had recently come back from the China-Burma theater had a suggestion. He pointed to the line of latitude that ran through what looked like the narrowest point of the peninsula.
The map designated it the 38th parallel. Everyone nodded; that would work. They alerted the Russians, who, somewhat to the Americans’ surprise, agreed. Within days of the XXIV Corps’ arrival they marched back across the 38th parallel and gathered their forces around the city of Pyongyang, north of the demarcation line but still less than forty miles from Seoul.
And there they were going to stay, Hodge knew. He was now free to get on with disarming the Japanese soldiers still south of the 38th parallel, and securing order and peace.
In idle moments, Hodge may have wondered who the army captain was who had come up with that line of demarcation.
His name, as it happened, was Dean Rusk.15
—
Douglas MacArthur was now the most powerful American in history.
He was the sole ruler of a country of eighty million people whose entire governing structure had been shattered along with its major cities: Almost 700,000 homes had been obliterated in Tokyo alone. He was also Japan’s first foreign ruler in more than two thousand years.
But MacArthur’s powers extended far beyond Japan. As head of AFPAC he led no fewer than six major military commands. There were the Sixth and Eighth Armies acting as occupation forces in Japan, commanded by his old colleagues Walter Krueger and Robert Eichelberger, respectively; the U.S. Army Forces in the West Pacific, which comprised the Philippines and the Ryukyu Islands, including Okinawa; U.S. Army Forces in the Middle Pacific, and General Hodge’s U.S. Army Forces in Korea. MacArthur was also head of Pacific Air Command, U.S. Army, with Ennis Whitehead in charge, which included planes, bases, and bomber and fighter squadrons both in and around Japan, like Atsugi, in the Philippines, islands in the central Pacific, and even as far away as Honolulu.
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