Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  MacArthur, however, refused to budge. He may not have been a lawyer, but he did understand the issue of responsibility of command. He wrote in his final review opinion in February:

  The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason of his being. When he violates that sacred trust, he not only profanes his entire cult but threatens the very fabric of international society.

  MacArthur went on:

  The traditions of fighting men are long and honorable. They are based upon the noblest of human traits—sacrifice. This officer [i.e., Yamashita] of proven field merit, entrusted with high command involving authority adequate to responsibility, has failed this irrevocable standard; has failed his duty to his troops, to his country, to his enemy, to mankind; has failed utterly his soldier faith.

  The soldier faith: it was an extraordinary statement of MacArthur’s most cherished belief, that the soldier’s calling was a sacred calling based on the willingness to sacrifice one’s own life for one’s fellow human beings. From MacArthur’s perspective, the taking of other lives in battle was secondary; and the taking of innocent life was beyond the pale.

  “Peculiarly callous and purposeless was the sack of the ancient city of Manila,” he continued, “with its Christian population and its countless historic shrines and monuments…which with campaign conditions reversed had previously been spared.”

  So there it was. Someone had to pay for the destruction of Manila, and its concomitant loss of Filipino lives, and that someone was to be Yamashita. He was free to argue—and did—that he had ordered the city evacuated, not destroyed, and that the decision to fight to the last man in the Manila streets had been taken by Admiral Iwabuchi, now dead. But if Yamashita had not ordered the city’s destruction, he had allowed it to happen; and that forgoing of responsibility, in addition to other crimes committed by his troops, were “a blot upon the military profession, a stain upon civilization and constitute a memory of shame and dishonor that can never be forgotten”—or expunged except by the death of the man responsible.

  Therefore, “I approve the findings and sentence of the Commission,” MacArthur concluded, and ordered the execution of “the judgement upon the defendant, stripped of uniform, decorations and other appurtenances signifying membership in the military profession.”37

  A petition arrived on MacArthur’s desk signed by 86,000 Japanese citizens asking him to either give Yamashita clemency or allow him to commit hara-kiri. MacArthur ignored it, and ordered an account of the trial by one of the defense attorneys, A. Frank Reel, to be banned from being translated into Japanese.38 Instead, on February 26, 1946, the “Tiger of Malaya” mounted the gallows.

  Yamashita’s conviction and death sealed the fate of MacArthur’s other opponent in the Philippines, the one who had bested him in battle, General Masaharu Homma.

  MacArthur had wanted Homma tried by an army tribunal, not the International Allied War Crimes Commission like Yamashita, as befitted someone whose actions against U.S. and Filipino troops, especially the Bataan death marches, were among the most heinous of the Pacific war.

  As the trial proceeded, however, the heinous story grew more and more ambiguous. It turned out Homma had had a plan to get U.S. and Filipino POWs safely and humanely into camps and to keep them fed; but instead of the 25,000 captives he had anticipated, he ended up with 75,000, most of them too sick or weak for the kind of march the Japanese had in mind.39 In addition, the supplies of rice and food for the Allied POWs turned out not to be ready because Wainwright’s surrender had come three weeks earlier than expected.

  Instead, the original plan collapsed and local commanders had to improvise. Homma’s argument in court was that he had been too preoccupied with the imminent siege of Corregidor to pay attention, and didn’t learn about what had happened, including at hellholes like the notorious POW center at Camp O’Donnell, until it was too late.

  It was a clever argument, but it drew no sympathy from the judges. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind, least of all MacArthur’s, that Homma had given his troops license to engage in sadistic brutality, including such treatment of Filipino civilians during the occupation of the Philippines.

  “Soldiers of an army invariably reflect the attitude of their General,” was how MacArthur stated it in his review of the final verdict. “The leader is the essence.” In this case, Homma had allowed his troops to brutalize and wantonly kill soldiers who had laid down their arms after a valiant and heroic struggle; “of all fighting men of all time none deserved more the honors of war.” That Homma had denied them that was “a violation of a fundamental code of chivalry” among fighting men, and “will forever shame the memory of the victorious troops.”40

  But there was another, more personal reason MacArthur believed Homma should pay the ultimate price.

  He disclosed it to Averell Harriman, FDR’s formal special envoy and now Truman’s, who arrived after a tour of American-occupied Korea and was on his way back to Washington. They discussed the Yamashita trial, and MacArthur read out his order that Yamashita be put to death, “with considerable emotion.” But when the conversation turned to General Homma, MacArthur’s mood grew even darker.

  He explained that when Wainwright offered to surrender Corregidor, Homma had threatened to shoot every American in the fortress if Wainwright didn’t order all the other American commanders in the Philippines to surrender as well, including Mindanao, to which Wainwright’s authority did not extend.

  It was a violation of the elementary rules of war, MacArthur said in a shaking voice, and “absolutely indefensible.” He rose and went to the table to pour a glass of water. But an astonished Harriman noted that tears were streaming down MacArthur’s cheeks.41

  In any case, there was no doubt as to what the ultimate verdict would be. On February 11 Homma was sentenced to death, although in a last-minute concession he was sentenced to be shot instead of hanged. There was another appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but this time the Court refused to hear the case: its ruling on the Yamashita case, it said, was the final word on the subject of war crimes trials (Murphy and Rutledge again furiously dissented).42

  So Homma was set to die for his crimes. Yet the story took still one more bizarre twist. On March 11 a somber MacArthur entered his office at the Dai-ichi building to learn that he had a visitor. It was Homma’s wife, Fukijo Homma, together with a defense attorney.

  MacArthur agreed to see them, although he later admitted it was “one of the most trying hours of my life.” She was not there to plead for her husband’s life, she told him. She wanted to thank him for letting her visit her husband during his imprisonment in the Philippines. At the same time, she hoped MacArthur would “consider carefully all the facts in the case” as he reviewed the final verdict. MacArthur said he would, and that he “understood and sympathized with her position.”

  There was an awkward pause. Then she said, “It’s a very hard job for you, I suppose.”

  According to her subsequent account of the meeting, MacArthur replied brusquely, “Never you mind about my job,” words that showed his tension and pent-up anger for the first time.

  She rose to leave. “Please remember me to your wife.”

  MacArthur said nothing as she and the attorney left.

  —

  “No trial could have been fairer than this one,” MacArthur wrote in his final review eleven days later. “No accused was ever given a more complete opportunity of defense, no judicial process was ever freer from prejudice.” He had also reviewed the evidence against Homma and the circumstances. “I can find no extenuation although I have searched for some instance upon which to bear palliation.” Failing to punish “such acts of criminal enormity” as the Bataan death marches would “threaten the very fabric of world society,” MacArthur concluded. Therefore, “I approve the finding of guilt and direct the Commanding General, United States Army Forces in the Western Pacific, to execute the sentence.”43
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br />   Seven days later, on April 6, Homma died by firing squad at Los Banos.

  —

  On New Year’s Day 1946, MacArthur had issued the following pronouncement:

  A New Year has come. With it, a new day dawns for Japan. No longer is the future to be settled by a few. The shackles of militarism, of feudalism, of regimentation of body and soul, have been removed. Thought control and the abuse of education is no more. All now enjoy religious freedom and the right of speech without undue restraint. Free assembly is guaranteed…The masses of Japan now have the power to govern and what is done must be done by themselves.44

  At that date there was still no finished constitution, and no elected government. The Tokyo war crimes trials, which traumatized the Japanese public and triggered recriminations against the American occupiers, were still in the offing. Yet when MacArthur said he had brought freedom to Japan, the Japanese believed him, then and later, and they loved him for it.

  In 1946 MacArthur had emerged as more than a proconsul, or “American shogun.” He had become the object of admiration, even veneration, to millions of Japanese who saw in the seventy-year-old supreme commander the kind of awe-inspiring reverence once reserved for Hirohito himself.

  Every morning crowds would gather outside the Dai-ichi building hoping to catch a glimpse of MacArthur as he arrived in his 1941 Cadillac at around 10 or 10:30 to begin his day, and the same scene occurred when he left in the evening. Letters poured in from every post, heaping accolades on their American conqueror. Some writers praised his “exalted and godlike benevolence,” while others spoke of him as a “living savior.” One man wrote describing how he worshiped MacArthur’s portrait every morning and evening as he used to worship the emperor’s portrait.45

  Others saw him in a variety of religious and semireligious lights. One cultural group in Kobe sent him a commissioned painting of Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount, with a letter comparing his leadership to that of the Son of God. Hundreds of ordinary Japanese wrote letters confessing their misdeeds during the war, as if he were a Catholic priest; others compared him to Buddha and the “friend from afar” mentioned in the Confucian Analects. Still more simply thanked him for giving them hope and happiness when they had feared what might happen under foreign occupation.

  He was daily showered with gifts, from dolls, elaborate scrolls and paintings, lacquered boxes, and miniaturized bonsai trees to freshly caught fish from local fishermen, live chickens from humble farmers (a dozen hens virtually became part of the American embassy staff), boxes of tea, lotus roots, dried chestnuts, and even a deerskin and antlers sent by a remote tribe of Ainu on the island of Hokkaido, with a note: “a token of our grateful appreciation for what he [i.e., MacArthur] has done to secure land for our people and give to Japan a democratic society, based on law and order.”

  One ten-year-old had grown a pumpkin from seeds he had received from the United States, and kept a journal of its progress, which he copied and sent to MacArthur, while the boy’s father sent along a painting he had made of the pumpkin. Someone else presented MacArthur with a fan on which he had written in tiny characters the entire text of the constitution. As historian John Dower points out, “These gifts were offered as simple expressions of gratitude to the supreme commander, not as the more calculated ritual gestures of reciprocity and dependency that characterized gift giving in the purely Japanese context.”46

  MacArthur brought to the process certain traits that fed into his virtual cult following during those heady years in Japan. He stood five feet ten, hardly towering, but he always looked taller because of his erect posture—and in a country where the average male was five four it gave him the physical aura of power and authority. He was also in his midsixties when he took over the occupation of a country that respected age as an emblem of wisdom and emotional gravitas.

  In addition, he conducted himself with an imperial aloofness that was one part deliberate and another part pure MacArthur, as the Dai-ichi building assumed an imperial solitude. Until the outbreak of war in Korea, he left Tokyo only twice in five years. Someone estimated that during his entire tenure in Japan, “only sixteen Japanese ever spoke to him more than twice, and none of these was under the rank, say, of Premier, Chief Justice, president of the largest university.”

  Above all, MacArthur believed that “the Oriental mind,” as he put it, would “adulate a winner,” and a supreme commander who projected himself as such—roles that came naturally to Douglas MacArthur. He understood that the prestige of this new institution in Japan, democracy, would depend on his prestige, and he was determined to play the invincible, all-knowing, but ever-compassionate leader to the hilt—even if it meant shutting himself away from the country he was governing.47

  He would need that prestige and power to take on the other mammoth task of the American occupation: the purge of old regime officials.

  The 1945 Potsdam conference had ordered the elimination “for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan,” from government officials to teachers and businessmen. MacArthur was of two minds about this. On one side, he definitely believed in clearing away those Japanese officials who might undermine his new, enlightened democratic order. On the other, “I doubted the wisdom of this measure as it tended to lose the services of many able government individuals” who would be difficult to replace—although the truth was that he later resisted the National Security Council’s efforts to reduce the scale of the wholesale purge he had been ordered to carry out.48

  The first step was a blanket ban on ultranationalist and militaristic groups like the Black Dragon Society and the Bayonet Practice Promotion Society, followed by a ban on the participation in government of individuals belonging to such groups, enacted on January 4, 1946. That meant that 90 percent of the old Japanese Diet were barred from reelection, while almost anyone who had served in Japanese public office for the past decade found himself out of a job. Thousands more lost their positions in business organizations, the press, and academic life. It was a far less thoroughgoing purge than the one taking place in post-Nazi Germany, where 2.5 percent of Germans in the American zone were affected, compared to only 0.3 percent of Japanese.49

  Nonetheless, it represented a considerable shakeup of Japanese society. One hundred eighteen senior officials lost their posts in Hirohito’s imperial household (a cousin, Prince Konoye, chose to commit suicide rather than face further scrutiny). Virtually everyone in the country had to fill out a questionnaire detailing past military record, his or her membership in societies and organizations, and job history—often going back as far as 1931. Sometimes family members suffered removal or disbarment as well.

  By 1947, however, no one was required to complete a questionnaire. Evasion became the norm, and by October 1948 the process had begun to run in reverse, with Washington ordering the reinstatement of people who had previously been seen as too collaborationist—and over MacArthur’s strenuous objections. In the end, as British historian Robert Harvey notes, “Denazification in Germany was a much more thorough and lasting process.”50 Yet whether Japan’s postwar recovery, both politically and economically, would have been as smooth if there had not been a radical rooting out of the old order is open to question.

  That is particularly true when it came to the zaibatsu, the great oligarchic companies like Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and Sumitomo that had dominated the imperial Japanese economy and had been central pillars of its authoritarian order—and supplied the military with arms for conquest.

  Most experts on Japan, including economist Thomas N. Bisson, assumed that a democratic order would require breaking up the zaibatsu, just as they assumed it demanded the removal of the emperor. MacArthur had defied them on the emperor issue, but he was wholeheartedly in support of an end of the zaibatsu.

  —

  Creating a new democratic Japan required “tearing down the traditional pyramid of economic power which has given only a few Japanese families direct o
r indirect control over all commerce and industry, all raw materials, all transportation, internal and external, and all coal and other power resources,” MacArthur told a Democratic senator, Brian McMahon. “The Japanese people fully understand the nature of the forces which have so ruthlessly exploited them in the past.”

  They understand, he explained to McMahon, that if “this concentration of economic power is not torn down and redistributed peacefully,” “its cleansing will eventually occur through a blood bath of revolutionary violence.”51

  Some then and later expressed surprise that MacArthur, the conservative anti-Communist, would be so forthright a foe of the Japanese version of big business. But he was also a progressive Republican of the Teddy Roosevelt variety, who had fought to break up monopolies like Standard Oil and other “malefactors of great wealth.” In MacArthur’s mind, the zaibatsu were more a species of socialism than capitalism.52 Their breakup would actually be a step toward “an economic system based upon free private competitive enterprise Japan has never known before.” Like the laws pushing land reform and permitting the formation of labor unions, the war on the zaibatsu would be indispensable for creating a new order of “competitive enterprise to release the long suppressed energies of the people towards the building of that higher productivity of a society which is free.”53

  As historians Meirion and Susie Harries note, “MacArthur’s ambition was to develop a laissez-faire economy in the American tradition, in which small and medium-sized enterprises would compete freely in an open market.”54 In August 1946 MacArthur gave the Japanese ninety days to break up all trade control associations and cartels and set up the Holding Company Liquidation Commission to oversee breakup of the interlocking directorates that made the zaibatsu so powerful. At the same time, some 2,200 zaibatsu loyalists were thrown out of top jobs in Japanese business and industry by mid-1947.55