Without realizing it, MacArthur, the Americans, and Syngman Rhee were sitting on a time bomb. All it would take was a nod from a man in the Kremlin to set it off.
—
The man in the Kremlin and his allies were flexing their muscles in Japan as well. A revived Japanese labor movement, with strong Communist Party participation, was intent on disrupting industrial relations through protests and strikes. The Soviet representatives in the Allied Council for Japan became more and more obstructionist, until they finally walked out.32
But MacArthur’s attention was largely focused on what was unfolding in a Tokyo courtroom in the early days of November 1948.
November 4 marked the conclusion of the war crimes trial of prominent Japanese war leaders that had begun in January 1946, and that ended, in the words of one historian, as “the most disgraceful and least important achievement of the American occupation.”33
MacArthur, for one, would have agreed with that judgment. He had no qualms about trying and executing military officers who violated the international laws of war, including Yamashita and Homma. But “the principle of holding criminally responsible the political leaders of the vanquished in war was repugnant to me,” he later wrote. “I felt that to do so was to violate the most fundamental rules of criminal justice.”34
That had been MacArthur’s view since the earliest days of the occupation. The other leaders of the victorious Allied powers disagreed, however. They envisaged a Japanese equivalent of the Nürnberg trial of Hitler’s henchmen for war crimes, and called together the International Military Tribunal of judges and prosecutors to try to convict Japan’s wartime leadership, including former prime minister Tojo. The tribunal opened proceedings on January 19, 1946, to great fanfare in both the Western and the Japanese press.
MacArthur washed his hands of the entire affair; indeed, the tribunal’s organizers had relieved him of any role in or responsibility for the tribunal before it began. But as the Tokyo trial dragged on month after tedious month, with witness after evasive witness, he began to sense that it was acting as a heavy undertow obstructing what he was trying to accomplish in creating a new Japan, and even sabotaging the bond of trust between Japanese and Americans that he was trying to build.
There was a prelude to the trouble to come when Prince Konoye, who had been a key advisor to Hirohito during the war, got wind of the fact that he was considered a possible defendant. Konoye, in fact, had spent months before the war trying to avert it; he even believed the Americans would see him as someone to be entrusted with a major leadership role in postwar Japan.35 Instead, he was stunned to discover that he had been added to the list of potential war criminals, including Tojo and General Matsui, the officer in charge of Japanese forces during the Rape of Nanking. He was even ordered to report to Sugamo Prison on December 16, 1945, for questioning.
The order made MacArthur’s staff deeply uncomfortable. “The understanding between us [i.e., General MacArthur and investigators] was that we would get word to Prince Konoye that we did not regard him as a war criminal like the others, that we only wanted him as a material witness,” Robert Fearey, a SCAP official, remembered. “I am afraid that word of this did not get to Prince Konoye in time. Someone forgot to tell him.”36
Instead, Konoye took a cyanide capsule the day before he was supposed to surrender. It was a bitter blow to MacArthur, and to Bonner Fellers, who had befriended Konoye and who had hoped Konoye could help draft a reform constitution. But fortunately for those who insisted that the vanquished Japanese leaders had to be punished, there were still plenty of other defendants. “They must have blood,” Douglas MacArthur said, echoing his father’s words during the Philippine insurgency, “and so there will be blood.”
The “trial of the century,” as it was termed by the media, was held at Ichigaya, the former headquarters of the Japanese army during the war. There were judges from eleven Allied nations, including the Soviet Union, more than 400 witnesses called, and some 779 affidavits from other witnesses entered in evidence against twenty-two defendants. Total documentation ran to more than 30,000 pages.37 The British prosecutor, Sir William Comyns Carr, had pieced together a complicated indictment that ensured that the trial would drag on for two and a half years—twice as long as the trial’s German equivalent at Nürnberg.
Yet as the proceedings wound along, they confirmed MacArthur’s prediction that their impact would be the reverse of what the instigators had hoped. Far from convincing the Japanese public (more than one thousand spectators were in the courtroom at any given time) that their past was steeped in war crimes, they instead tarnished the image of the American occupation as fair-minded and nonvindictive. To the defendants, especially former premier Tojo, the trial offered a chance to present their decisions during the war in the best possible light—indeed, to whitewash Japan’s aggressive war intentions. Tojo in particular was in fine fettle—arguing with prosecutors, contradicting witnesses, and presenting himself as a heroic leader and imperial Japan as a country that had been sinned against more than it had sinned.
The Allies, especially the United States, had provoked Japan into going to war, he said. Japan’s aims in China, for example, had included “neither territorial ambition nor the idea of economic monopoly.” Its empire overseas, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, had been established to “secure political freedom for all peoples of Greater East Asia,” not to exploit its subject peoples for Japan’s gain. As for Tojo himself, he claimed he had not known that the Japanese fleet had set sail for the attack on Pearl Harbor, and “neither gave orders for, tolerated, nor connived at any inhuman acts,” including massacres of civilians or prisoners of war. A prosecutor asked him if he wasn’t ashamed of Japan’s alliance with Adolf Hitler. “No, I do not entertain any such cowardly views,” Tojo indignantly replied.38
But probably the most damaging admission came when Tojo was being cross-examined on the decision to go to war. He related that Emperor Hirohito had not been informed of the details of the Pearl Harbor attack plan, but had known of the decision to go to war. Hirohito had “assented, though reluctantly, to the war,” Tojo told the court. “[N]one of us would have dared act against the Emperor’s will.”39
It was a grim moment of truth, both for the Tokyo trial and for the entire rationale of the American occupation. The framework for postwar Japan had been built around the idea of retaining the emperor as head of state, on the grounds that he was blameless for Japan’s going to war—indeed, had even secretly opposed it. Tojo’s admission shattered that illusion. There would have been no war if Hirohito hadn’t approved of it, “though reluctantly.” And if others who had approved of the decision to attack were now on trial for waging aggressive war, then why wasn’t the emperor?
That became the unanswered question during the rest of the Tokyo trial—unanswered because the prosecution refused to let it be asked. In fact, prosecutors worked hard to keep any evidence showing Hirohito’s war guilt from surfacing—or at least to bury it in the growing mounds of documentation. The fiction that Hirohito was blameless for the decisions made by his cabinet during seven years of war in Asia, costing some seventeen million lives, had to be maintained even at the expense of the truth, or—as some would argue afterward—justice itself.
By the time the trial finally ended, on November 4, 1948, the verdicts were almost an anticlimax. The formal judgment took eight days to read, from November 7 until November 12. No fewer than forty-five of the fifty-five charges against the accused were thrown out, although every defendant was found guilty of something. More strikingly, the judges themselves were sharply divided on who was guilty of what. The Indian justice, Radhabinod Pal, acquitted everyone in a judicial opinion that was almost as long as the original indictment. Another found five defendants not guilty, while two judges, Webb of Australia and Henri Bernard of France, were upset that Hirohito had escaped indictment and wrote scathing critiques of the proceedings that to this day hold up under expert scrutiny.40
> Yet, as MacArthur himself had argued, the real problem had been in the very conception of the trial. The idea that one could organize a war crimes trial in Japan based on the Nürnberg model was misconceived from the start. In Japan there had been no inner circle or camarilla of devoted followers like the one Hitler had mobilized in the thirties. Likewise, there was no national party like the National Socialists; and there were no elite organizations like the SS and Gestapo, controlling and directing the course of government. In short, there was no Japanese Hitler, and no Japanese Himmler either. There were only self-interested, self-deluded men making decisions without regard to consequences—not unlike politicians anywhere. They had been driven by a brutal, inhumane ideology infused by illusions of racial superiority, but there was no organized campaign of genocide, or even collective war guilt, that a team of lawyers could unearth from the surviving documents.
So the sentences, when they came, were piecemeal and supported by only a majority of judges—in some cases a slender majority. Seven were sentenced to death; sixteen to life imprisonment. Former prime minister Koki Hirota was sentenced to death by the vote of only six of the eleven justices. MacArthur had been right: the trials proved to be a travesty. Some branded it “victor’s injustice”; back in Washington George Kennan had to agree that the trials were “ill-conceived, psychologically unsound.” It “would have been much better received and understood,” he concluded, “if we had shot these people out of hand at the time of surrender.”41
That still left the question of how to carry the sentences out. That responsibility, as it happened, fell on MacArthur as head of SCAP, leaving the irony that the man who had most opposed the trial now had to execute its verdicts. His solution to his dilemma was to summon each of the representatives of the eleven Allied powers involved in the trial, including the Philippines, and ask each for his view of the verdicts. One by one, the diplomats entered the office in the Dai-ichi building and went over the sentences with MacArthur. Only two, Chakravarty of India and Baron Lewe Van Aduard of Holland, recommended any reduction in sentences. Two others, one of whom was Patrick Shaw of Australia, said they were not opposed to any changes, but would not go on the record opposing the sentences imposed.42
MacArthur called in Bill Sebald to witness his review of the final sentences.
He had decided to make no changes; he upheld every one of the tribunal’s sentences, reading each one in a low, intense voice that, Sebald said later, “affected me deeply” with a reaction of “sadness, sympathy, admiration, and impending doom.” He recommended that there be no photographers at any hanging.
MacArthur agreed; it “would violate all sense of decency.” He would order the new commanding general of the Eighth Army, Walton Walker, to carry out the sentences one week after November 25. MacArthur set no definitive date, however, on which they were to be executed.43
Sebald watched MacArthur’s composure crumple as they sat opposite each other in the Dai-ichi office. “Bill,” MacArthur finally said in a low voice, “that was a difficult decision to make.” Now it was in Walker’s hands, and the United States Supreme Court’s. The justices in Washington heard appeals from seven of the Tokyo trial defendants, including Tojo and Hirota, and on December 20 denied them all, saying “the military tribunal sentencing these petitioners has been set up by General MacArthur as the agent of the Allied Powers” and that “under the foregoing circumstances the courts of the United States have no power or authority to review, to affirm, set aside or annul the judgments and sentences.”
The hangings were set to begin at Sugamo Prison at 12:01 A.M., December 23. Sebald attended the hangings, along with diplomats of the members of the Allied Council for Japan. MacArthur refused to go; if the Allied Council must have blood, he reasoned, they could do without him present.
In his mind the issue was closed. “I was pleasantly surprised at the attitude of the Japanese people during the period of trial,” he wrote afterward. There were no public disturbances, no disorderly petitions on behalf of the condemned. On the contrary, “the prisoners and their families made it a point to write letters to me and to the tribunal after their conviction to express their thanks for our impartiality and justice.”44
Yet he knew the trials had not helped the American cause in Japan. It had all been so unnecessary, including the revelations about the emperor’s role in the war. MacArthur and Feller’s stand on Hirohito had been clear from the start: it was impossible to move forward without him, and any calculation of his status had to depend on what he would do in the future, not what he had done in the past. And so Hirohito remained in power; Japan’s political establishment had been rocked but not overthrown.
Meanwhile, seven men had died for crimes they may or may not have committed—crimes they may or may not have been able to prevent. Some observers, including India’s justice Pal, had wondered aloud whether American leaders on trial for the firebombing of Japan or the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have fared as well. It’s a debate that still goes on today.
In the end, the outcome of the Tokyo war crimes trial was another sign that MacArthur’s awesome authority as head of SCAP was fading. First there had been Kennan’s visit, and the promulgation of NSC 13/2; then came fresh pro-Communist labor demonstrations in the spring of 1950, surrounding May Day, that threatened to disrupt the new social compact MacArthur had wanted for Japan.
But the real forces that would rip apart MacArthur’s hope that the American occupation of Japan pointed the way to a peaceful future, were gathering on the Korean peninsula 400 miles away.
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By the spring of 1950, the containment policy that Truman, Kennan, and Secretary of State Acheson had developed was working well in Europe. The Atlantic Alliance, anchored in NATO, provided a military shield against Soviet expansion; the Marshall Plan was reviving Western Europe’s society and economy.
An emergency aid program to Greece and Turkey had halted the Soviet threat to the eastern Mediterranean, while the Berlin Airlift had forestalled a major crisis—while assuring Europeans that the United States would stand by its commitments.
In Asia, however, containment had not fared so well. In addition to the rise of the new Soviet satellite North Korea, the collapse of nationalist China and Mao’s takeover of the Chinese mainland in early 1949 had sent shock waves through the region but also through Washington. The question of how the Truman administration had managed to “lose China” would animate the first critics of containment on the right, who questioned whether containment of the Soviet Union was really a sufficient policy when tens of millions remained enslaved behind the Iron Curtain—and when Communism seemed to be steadily advancing on the other side of the world, in the Pacific. The first test of a Soviet atomic bomb, in September 1949, only intensified the debate on Capitol Hill as to who was really winning the Cold War and who was losing.
The policy of containment suffered from a major flaw. It assumed that Stalin and his allies would stand by while the United States and its allies enveloped them with a broad network of diplomatic and military alliances, and remain passive while the internal contradictions of Communist rule—as Kennan had postulated in his Long Telegram—led to Communism’s final collapse.45 Kennan and the other architects of containment never considered what would happen if Communism decided to break the deadlock, and chose as the point of breakout not where American forces were unambiguously committed, like Western Europe, but a place where political and strategic realities militated against U.S. action.
That place was Korea, and the man who would have to save containment from its major strategic flaw would be Douglas MacArthur.
CHAPTER 29
WAR AGAIN
No lack of resolve here.
—GEORGE F. KENNAN, LATE JUNE 1950
It was before dawn on Sunday, June 25, 1950, when the phone rang in MacArthur’s bedroom in the American embassy in Tokyo. It was the duty officer at GHQ on the line, and his voice was tense and urgent.
“General, we have just received a dispatch from Seoul, advising that the North Koreans have struck in great strength south across the 38th Parallel at four o’clock this morning.”
MacArthur’s reaction was “an uncanny feeling of nightmare.” Nine years earlier a similar Sunday phone call had come to him in his Manila Hotel penthouse, with the dreadful news of Pearl Harbor. Now, he realized, a similar policy of weakness and neglect had allowed North Korea, backed by its Soviet and Chinese allies, to try to overrun its southern neighbor—and there was little or nothing MacArthur or U.S. forces could do to stop them.1
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Of course, Korea was a pot that had been coming to a boil for years.
There were the disagreements over elections in the North and the South, with the Soviets ultimately closing the border. There were the strikes and revolts in 1948, culminating in the army mutiny in October that year that had claimed some 30,000 lives.
In the end, the military balance of power in Korea had coalesced not around the United States and the Soviet Union, but around their two proxies: Kim Il Sung and his Communist People’s Democratic Republic of Korea north of the 38th parallel, and Syngman Rhee and his Republic of Korea to the south, with a growing Republic of Korea Army, or ROKA, trained and equipped by the United States. Although the two leaders were ideological opposites, both Kim and Rhee were fervently committed to the same goal, the unification of the peninsula by force if necessary, under their own government.
Kim had the better tools to do it. While the Americans had supplied Syngman Rhee with arms to defend his country from attack, they steadfastly refused to give him weapons for going on the offensive across the border. As a result, the Republic of Korea’s “army” was hardly more than a glorified police force. By contrast, when the Soviets left the peninsula in January 1949, they had left behind tons of equipment for Kim’s Korean People’s Army or KPA, including late-model T-34 tanks—the same tanks that had spearheaded the Russian advance into Berlin in 1945. In addition, any Communist force advancing south would find a ready and willing fifth column, consisting of thousands of North Koreans who had infiltrated across the 38th parallel over the past four years, in anticipation of an invasion by Pyongyang.
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