But that number also meant it was time to close in on the Japanese home islands and someone had to command the effort. It had come down to a choice between Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur and Roosevelt picked MacArthur. Air Corps General Kenney told him about it before the official announcement because he had seen the president on a recent trip to Washington and was asked to “tell Douglas that I expect he will have a lot of work to do North of the Philippines before long.”
“I don’t believe it,” growled MacArthur when Kenney told him he “had heard a rumor that he was going to command the show in Japan.”
MacArthur said he had information that Nimitz was to be in charge and that he would be relegated to clean up the Philippines and then move south to the Dutch East Indies. “Who gave you that rumor anyhow?” he asked.
“A man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” Kenney replied.27
Still, it was decided that the next invasion would be to secure airfields on the enemy stronghold of Okinawa in the northern Pacific, only three hundred miles south of Japan. It was shaping up as the worst and biggest battle yet, but MacArthur would not be in it. Nimitz’s Central Pacific Command would run that show with a combination of U.S. Marines and U.S. Army divisions. MacArthur, however, had other things to occupy him, namely the arrival of his wife Jean, son Arthur, now seven, and Ah Cheu the amah, or nanny. They had been in Australia and MacArthur had not seen them in nearly five months.
WHILE THE AMERICANS HAD mostly overtaken the Philippines, Japanese remained almost everywhere in the islands. They still needed to be suppressed, and MacArthur sent Eichelberger’s Eighth Army south to do the job while Krueger’s Sixth Army on Luzon “mopped up” the remnants of Yamashita’s force who had taken to the mountains.
In a phrase that some saw as confusing or contradictory, MacArthur in dispatches or press releases generally referred to the elimination of such concentrations as “mopping up,” a term usually understood to mean dealing with an enemy incapable of organized resistance—but in more than one case the Japanese garrisons proved far larger that the SWPA chief predicted.
For instance, MacArthur told Eichelberger he “did not believe there were four thousand Japanese left alive on Mindanao,” when in fact there were nearly twenty-four thousand.28
Included in the southernmost of these operations were Australian troops under MacArthur’s command, which caused the Australian government to balk at the notion of losing more men this close to the end of the war, but MacArthur countered by saying the assaults were in part to secure the rich oil fields of the Dutch Indies in preparation for the invasion of Japan. (Unfortunately and ironically, when Australian troops invaded Borneo they found the oil fields there so smashed up from Allied bombing they could not resume production for over a year.)
Some historians and biographers have criticized MacArthur for initiating these secondary operations because he didn’t seek permission from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But MacArthur evidently did not think he needed permission for what he considered housekeeping. The Japanese were oppressing the people throughout the archipelago and elsewhere and in his view the sooner they were disposed of the better. MacArthur was a sensitive and caring figure when it came to the civilian populations, especially in the Philippines, and he looked on the Filipinos in an almost fatherly way.
Also, MacArthur had secured from Washington a massive $100 million in relief funds to rebuild Manila, much of which had been destroyed between the pyromaniacal urges of the Japanese and the U.S. artillery bombardments during the final battle. His wife Jean was a constant presence during the relief and reconstruction effort, which seemed to subdue some of MacArthur’s critics, who had been complaining that no other officer kept his wife and family in the theater of war.
They lived during this period in a fine mansion that had survived the fighting. Casa Blanca was the home of a Mrs. Bachrach, whose husband, the country’s wealthiest car dealer, had been killed by the Japanese. It was swank, with a swimming pool, sauna, and lovely gardens. MacArthur had euchred his friend General Kenney out of the home after Kenney—who originally found the house and put in a request for it as his personal quarters—told MacArthur how great it was and, foolishly, where it was. MacArthur had been unhappy with the quarters he’d been provided prior to Jean and little Arthur’s arrival. It had been a house on the Pasig River that was “dank” and the river “a sewer” in which more than the occasional dead body floated past.29
The morning after filing his paperwork for the estate, Kenney went looking for MacArthur but he couldn’t find him. Later that day the supreme commander of SWPA informed the astonished Kenney, “George, I did a kind of dirty trick on you. I stole your house.”30
Kenney eventually one-upped his boss when he found an even swankier home in the neighborhood. Mrs. Bachrach, it seemed, had a sister who was equally rich and who had ordered her builder to construct something “better” than her sister’s house.31
After moving in, MacArthur used whatever spare time he had doting on little Arthur, instructing him to march in close order drill, reading to him from Grimms’ Fairy Tales and other children’s books. Since all the schools in Manila had been destroyed in the fighting they hired an English tutor for the youngster, who stayed with the MacArthurs throughout the war.
In the meanwhile, MacArthur and his staff were busy planning for the invasion of Japan. Although he denied it later, MacArthur thought it would be necessary to bring the Russians into the war with Japan, “with a hundred divisions in Manchuria.”
On April 12 the day Franklin Roosevelt died, MacArthur received a message from George Marshall asking his opinion of how best to end the war against Japan. One school of thought, Marshall said, recommends a blockade and constant aerial bombardment instead of invasion; the other recommends “driving straight into Japan proper.” MacArthur favored the latter.
There is nothing on the record as to MacArthur’s personal reaction to the president’s death but it must have affected him deeply. He’d been on intimate terms with Roosevelt ever since he was appointed chief of staff of the army in 1930. Neither man fully trusted the other but each enjoyed the other’s company and respected his talents. Roosevelt, for his part, had favored MacArthur over the navy, which had always wanted to control the war in the Pacific, and the president had named him as commander for the invasion of Japan.
On the other hand, MacArthur was never comfortable serving under anyone else, and probably considered Roosevelt his true boss, bypassing George Marshall and the chiefs of staff. He was therefore wary of Harry Truman when he assumed the presidency after Roosevelt’s passing. Truman was an entity unknown.
No matter who the president, MacArthur believed an invasion of Japan would be relatively easy compared with some of the battles being fought lately. He was appalled by the slaughter at Iwo Jima, and now Okinawa, which was “just awful”—12,520 soldiers and marines had shed their lives and 35,600 were wounded. In his view, the navy’s Central Pacific Command continued “needlessly” losing men’s lives by insisting on killing the Japanese to the last man.
In less than a week, in all these landings, MacArthur posited, the marines and army forces had secured all the area they needed for airfields and should have gone on the defensive and let the Japanese break themselves on the Allied lines—perhaps forgetting that is exactly what the marines did in 1942 at Guadalcanal where they suffered 7,100 dead of 60,000 engaged, a dreadful killed-to-deployed ratio in which one in every eight men died.
By now, MacArthur said, the Japanese were nearly prostrated. Japan’s navy lay at the bottom of the ocean, its air force was decimated, the means of transportation and production were smashed to atoms, and the nation’s major cities were firebombed to char.
Japan did, however, possess a large land defense force if home militias were included, filled with conscripted males between the ages of fifteen and sixty and females from seventeen to forty, some equipped only with ancient muskets, spears, bows and arrows, and scythes. All told,
on paper the Japanese could field a home army of 34,600,000, but only 2,350,000 of those were regular soldiers. With the war in Europe coming to an end, even without Russia, the Allies could put twelve to fifteen entire armies into the fight, with all their artillery and armor as well as the enormous airpower they possessed.
MacArthur didn’t think it would come to that, and said so. He believed the Japanese politicians would ultimately force the army to make a peace—but it wouldn’t be easy owing to the Allied insistence on “unconditional surrender” advanced by President Roosevelt at the 1943 Casablanca Conference.
However, by this time, Japanese diplomats were known to be making entreaties to the Soviet Union, which remained officially neutral in the contest, to broker a negotiated peace in which the emperor would continue to rule. The powers in the War Department did not subscribe to this scenario and were making every effort to assemble a powerful force to invade the Japanese mainland and crush the empire for good.
WHEN KRUEGER’S SIXTH ARMY had nearly eliminated any threat from the rest of Yamashita’s Japanese on Luzon, MacArthur got a hankering for combat again and on June 2 once more cast off aboard Boise with a handful of staff members for what Eichelberger cavalierly described as a “grand tour” of the current battlefields. The big cruiser stopped at all of the large islands of the central and southern Philippines where, to the dismay of his staff—especially his personal physician Colonel Egeberg—MacArthur again insisted on going ashore into, and often beyond, the front lines.
Like George Patton, MacArthur seemed drawn to danger that fueled some militant compulsion in his psyche, perhaps needing to prove over and again that he was bulletproof; Patton himself in his letters to Beatrice had compared this sort of syndrome with steeplechasing, in which the expression “riding at breakneck speed” is no mere coin of phrase—in jumping fences and hedges, as in battle, death was always the outrider. June 10 found the cruiser Boise lying off Borneo’s Brunei Bay so that MacArthur could watch Australian troops hit the beaches to retake Brunei City. On the following day he went ashore and waded through a mile of swamp to waiting jeeps that were to take his entourage to the battlefront.
This “Brass Hat Party,” as Kenney characterized it, drove inland “to the accompaniment of an occasional sniper’s shot and a burst of machine-gun fire.” MacArthur was “enjoying himself hugely,” when a firefight broke out just ahead between an Australian tank and enemy snipers hidden in trees. The tank won, and MacArthur and party left the jeeps and walked forward to inspect the scene. Two dead Japanese lay in a ditch. MacArthur remarked that they were probably part of a suicide outfit left to resist to the last. Intensely wary, Kenney and the others were “nodd[ing] nonchalantly (as possible)” when suddenly a photographer standing right next to MacArthur collapsed to the ground with a sniper’s bullet in his shoulder.
MacArthur nevertheless wanted to move even farther forward, which was enough for Kenney, one of the few people, if not the only person, in SWPA who would stand up to the chief. He told MacArthur it was important to get back to the Boise in time for dinner; that as guests of the navy to do otherwise would be discourteous, and that the captain had promised to serve chocolate ice cream (MacArthur’s favorite) for dessert.
This caused MacArthur to smile. He said, “All right, George, we’ll go back. I wouldn’t have you miss that chocolate ice cream for anything.”32
THERE IS AMPLE EVIDENCE that MacArthur favored giving the Soviet Union concessions in the Far East for revoking their treaty and declaring war on Japan, but when he learned of the extent of the compromises agreed to by President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference he professed to be “shocked.”
Neither MacArthur nor other top military commanders were informed of the Manhattan Project, the ultra-top-secret undertaking to build an atomic bomb. They were told of the existence of the bomb only a few days before the first one was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Ten days earlier, at a top-level conference at Potsdam, Germany, the Allies had issued an ultimatum for Japan to either surrender or become, as it did in MacArthur’s words, “the victim of the most destructive and revolutionary weapon in the long history of warfare.”
Two days after the first bomb was dropped the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and the day after that a second U.S. atomic bomb destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki. That was enough for the Japanese government, which despite violent internal opposition agreed to the terms of surrender offered by the Allies.
The Truman administration picked MacArthur to preside over the formal surrender ceremonies, which were set for early September 1945. MacArthur’s staff was “unutterably opposed” to his plan of flying into Atsugi air base, near Yokohama, which was home to a large renegade band of kamikaze pilots who only days before had revolted against the surrender, stormed the palace grounds, and murdered the commanding general of the emperor’s Imperial Guard, among others. With this in mind the Japanese military had entered the air base and removed the propellers from all of the aircraft.
Nevertheless on August 30 MacArthur landed at Atsugi in his C-54 Bataan in the shadow of what his military secretary recorded as Japan’s “greatest opportunity for a final and climactic act.” Taking note of the many antiaircraft batteries surrounding the airfield and Japan’s flagrant disregard for “the usual laws of war,” Brigadier General Courtney Whitney was genuinely surprised when they were not blown out of the sky, and only after they were safely on the ground did he concede that MacArthur had been right not to worry about treachery. “He knew the basic Japanese character too well to have thus gambled blindly with death.”33
Smoking his corncob pipe, MacArthur left the plane and met General Eichelberger who had arrived a day earlier. “Well Bob,” he said, “from Melbourne to Tokyo is a long way, but this seems to be the end of the road.”
They were soon met by what Whitney called a string of “the most decrepit vehicles I have ever seen.” It was, however, the best means of transportation the Japanese could assemble for their ride to Yokohama’s New Grand Hotel, which would be the Allied headquarters for the time being. All along the tedious fifteen-mile drive past heaps of bombed-out rubble tens of thousands of armed Japanese soldiers stood at attention with their backs to MacArthur in the same “gesture of respect” they showed to their emperor.34
That evening, MacArthur was just sitting down to dinner when word came that General Wainwright was in the hotel lobby. Rising immediately, MacArthur strode toward the door when suddenly there was “Skinny” Wainwright, whom MacArthur had left in command at Bataan in 1942 and who had suffered horribly for three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. He was shriveled and walked with the aid of a cane.
“He made an effort to smile,” MacArthur said, moved to tears, “his hair was snow white and his skin looked like old shoe leather.” When MacArthur embraced his old friend, Wainwright began to choke up.
“He’d imagined himself in disgrace for having surrendered Corregidor,” said MacArthur, and he believed that he would never hold active command again.
“Why Jim,” MacArthur told him, shocked, “your old corps is yours whenever you want it.” The emotion that shone on Wainwright’s face at that moment haunted MacArthur until the day he died.35
MACARTHUR WAS SENT A FORMAL SURRENDER document approved by the highest authorities in Washington, but he was on his own as to what to say. To whom to say it, however, was a different matter—virtually a who’s who of the entire Pacific war would be on hand to witness the momentous event, which was held aboard the battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945. Besides MacArthur’s gang, there were bigwigs from every nation at war with Japan, plus Nimitz and Halsey from the navy, Hap Arnold and Jimmy Doolittle from the air force, and George Marshall and the other chiefs of the services, while nearly every foot of deck space was occupied—even the turrets and long barrels of the 16-inch guns—by jubilant sailors from the fleet.
The Japanese delegation was a woebegone lot; for a nation that made idolization of pride a m
atter of personal honor these high-ranking militarists and diplomats suffered the uttermost humiliation imaginable. No one would volunteer for the “odious duty” and so selections had to be made, the choice to represent the diplomatic mission falling at last on Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and, to stand for the military, General Yoshijiro Umezu, a die-hard militarist who threatened to commit hara-kiri if forced to sign a surrender treaty.
These two men were accompanied by a dozen or so aides, the diplomats dressed somewhat formally in morning clothes with white gloves and incongruous-looking top hats, and appeared before the thronged deck of Missouri looking as embarrassed as if they had on no clothes at all. One of their number, a Japanese diplomat named Toshikazu Kase, a graduate of Amherst and Harvard, recorded the following reaction: “We waited for a few minutes standing in the public gaze like penitent boys awaiting the dreaded schoolmaster. Never have I realized that the glance of glaring eyes could hurt so much.”
Beneath graying skies MacArthur, flanked by the pitifully thin generals Jonathan Wainwright and Arthur Percival (who had also endured the hardships of Japanese incarceration after the surrender of the British army at Singapore), stepped forward to the forum, which was an old mess table covered in green felt cloth.
“We are gathered here,” MacArthur said to a live worldwide radio audience, “representatives of the warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace can be restored.” He went on to note that the issues leading into the war had been settled on the battlefields, and that both the victors and the vanquished should put aside “hatreds and distrust” and “rise to that higher dignity” that peace would bring. “It is my earnest hope,” he told the audience, “that a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded on faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance and justice.” He then called for the two Japanese delegates to come forward and sign the document of surrender.