Shigemitsu, a peacemaker, clattered across the deck with his cane, limping heavily on his wooden leg, followed by a scowling General Umezu. They put their names on the peace treaty. MacArthur then signed it as Supreme Commander of all the Allied Powers and on behalf of the United States as well, giving Wainwright and Percival each a pen that he had used.† Then representatives of the other warring nations were invited to sign and MacArthur stepped to the microphone: “Let us pray now that peace be restored to the world and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are closed.”
“At that moment,” Kase wrote afterward, “the skies parted and the sun shone brightly through the layers of clouds. There was a steady drone above and now it became a deafening roar and an armada of U.S. airplanes paraded into sight, sweeping over the warships.” When the flights of thousands of planes had moved on, MacArthur stepped to the microphone for a final time.
“Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death—the seas bear only commerce—men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight … In reporting this to you, the people, I speak for the silent lips forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way … We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war.
“A new era is upon us,” MacArthur continued, his voice rising at its theatrical best. “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 … We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.” MacArthur’s voice echoed across the decks of the battleship Missouri and into the homes of millions worldwide, dramatic, profound, stirring. It was statesmanlike MacArthur at his very best.
Then he turned to his soldiers’ families listening at home, telling them, “Today I report to you that your sons and daughters have served you well and faithfully … Their spiritual strength and power has brought us through … They are homeward bound—take care of them.”
* Harold Ickes was an avid New Dealer and hatchet man for President Roosevelt. Whenever the press wanted a stinging, acerbic comment about a policy or a person that the White House would find awkward to make, they would seek out Ickes.
† General Yamashita had held out to the last in the Luzon mountains and surrendered his diminished army to American forces after the emperor’s broadcast on August 15. He did so in the presence of the Allied generals Wainwright and Percival who had been released from Japanese prison camps and flown to the Philippines for that purpose.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE
The Second World War convulsed the earth in seismic proportions. In its wake men wished for peace in our time and a return to normalcy; instead, within a few years, it let loose a world again at war over the ideology of expansive communism and fierce religious animosities.
Enormous China resumed its civil war, which had been postponed during the Japanese occupation between the Communists of Mao Tse-tung and the ruling Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai-shek. In eastern Europe, the Balkans, and in Greece, the Soviet Union began undermining countries prostrated from the war by subversive infiltration that often instigated civil wars. The Soviets installed puppet Communist governments in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary and were suspected of murdering the foreign minister of the Czech Republic by defenestration before that nation was also absorbed as a Soviet satellite.
In Greece, Soviets backed a Communist guerrilla army against the monarchy and were subverting the shaky governments of Italy and France. In Southeast Asia, the Communist guerrillas of Ho Chi Minh began waging war against the French after they had tried to reclaim their colonies following the Japanese occupation. The Soviets held North Korea and would eventually attack the democratic South, drawing the United States and the United Nations into war. There were armed Communist insurgencies in Malaya and the Philippines. The African volcano had begun to smoke but had not yet erupted.
The British, French, and Dutch, who were bankrupted by the war, were forced to give up their great colonial empires, adding further unrest and strife: in India Muslims battled Hindus; in the Middle East there was fighting between Arabs and Jews; and in the South Seas a war broke out between the Dutch and their allies against Indonesians who wished for independence.
It was a rocky world and anyone attempting to navigate it was subject to being dashed. So it was with George Marshall, who wanted nothing more than to retire with his wife Katherine to his country home Dodona Manor, in Leesburg, Virginia, where he sometimes puttered in the garden or cleaned leaves from the gutters. He had stayed on as chief of the army’s General Staff to preside over the demobilizing of the nine million soldiers under his command. More than two hundred thousand of them had been killed and nearly six hundred thousand wounded. Marshall had sent millions of jeeps and trucks into war surplus and consigned tens of thousands of military fighter planes and bombers to the scrap heap. A few years later during the Berlin blockade crisis when he was told to “give the Russians hell,” he would say with no small touch of irony, “My facilities for giving them hell—and I am a soldier and know something about giving hell—were one and one third [infantry] divisions over the entire United States.”1
Marshall retired from the army on November 18, 1945, and moved from his Quarters Number 1 at Fort Myer to Dodona. The day they arrived, Katherine went upstairs to take a nap and the phone rang. Marshall answered it. Later, when Katherine came downstairs, she found Marshall sitting in the sunroom listening to a newscast and was flabbergasted when it was announced that he had just been named Truman’s new special ambassador to China. He would leave immediately.
“That phone call when we came in was from the president,” Marshall said. “I could not bear to tell you until you had your rest.”2
Truman prevailed on Marshall because he had decided the current ambassador was not getting anywhere in settling the fate of the largest country on earth with its half a billion citizens. The U.S. State Department had for some reason concluded that the Communist insurrection was so strong the only solution was to persuade Chiang Kai-shek to include the Communists in his government, and then to convince Mao and his deputy Chou En-lai to accept. Little did Marshall realize the utter impossibility of this approach.
Nearly everybody in the world had heard of the great George Marshall, including the Chinese—both Nationalist and Communist—and they would show him the utmost respect as he shuttled between Nationalist and Communist capitals in China touting the advantages of ending the civil war.
Each side agreed it would be a good thing, but neither side would stop fighting. Marshall continually threatened Chiang with withholding $500 million of U.S. aid, and Chiang would agree to yet another ceasefire. But within a few days the shooting would start once more. Marshall didn’t have anything to threaten Mao with. It was maddening.
The Chinese Communists were more or less controlled by Moscow and to have Soviet-style communism in a democratic government was simply unworkable because the two ideologies are polar opposites—like putting a cobra and a mongoose in the same room and expecting them to get along.
But the U.S. State Department did not seem to comprehend that. Its representative appeared to view the Chinese Communists as a band of simple agrarian farmers who were merely seeking a better life. Thus, Marshall’s instructions from Washington were to mend the fences between the two warring groups and inspire them with the spirit of cooperation.
He arrived in Shanghai right before Christmas 1945—his first trip back to China since his tour of duty there with the 15th Infantry Regiment in 1927. He was met by his friend Lieutenant General Albert Wedemeyer, the army’s top military commander in China, who was generally accepted as an “old China hand.”
When Wedemeyer learned of Marshall’s mission he informed him it was fantastic, that there was no common
ground for a coalition government between Nationalists and Communists, neither of whom trusted the good faith of the other. Marshall jumped down Wedemeyer’s throat—“I am going to accomplish my mission and you are going to help me,” he snapped.
As each so-call truce broke, Marshall’s frustration grew. Chiang stated: “Can it be he has not yet understood the deceptive nature of Communist maneuvers? More and more he is being taken in by the Communists. The Americans tend to be naive and trusting. This is true even with so experienced a man as Marshall.”
After a year, Marshall had to admit failure. He summed it up by saying, “I tried to please everyone. The result was that by the time I left nobody trusted me.”
In January 1947 he returned to the United States where, as a consolation prize, Truman named him secretary of state. Now, instead of having just China to worry about, Marshall had the world, and it was on fire.
THE MOST PRESSING PROBLEMS CONCERNED EUROPE, much of which had been exhausted by the war and was vulnerable to Communist destabilization. Marshall, like many Americans of his day, still was not ready to believe that the Russians could not be trusted. His immediate task was to preside over the U.S. delegation at the Moscow Conference over the future of Germany and Austria.
Two years earlier at the Potsdam Conference, the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union split Germany into four zones of occupation. Surrender papers had been signed at the close of the war but now a peace treaty was needed to decide how best to get Germany back on its feet: its continued collapse with virtually no trade in either direction was dragging down its neighbors.
The U.S. position that Marshall argued was to allow Germany slowly to get back into manufacturing in nonmilitary-type goods, and with strict quotas on such military necessities as steel, rubber, glass, etc.* The Soviets rejected this proposal, demanding instead that all remaining German factories be dismantled and sent to the Soviet Union and that Germany be ruled by a strong central government (which could be easily subverted by Communists) and forced to pay the Soviet Union $20 billion in war reparations.†
Marshall patiently tried to explain to the Soviet negotiator, foreign minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov, that Germany was too important a nation in both natural and human resources to be made to lie idle; her recovery was necessary for reviving the fading health of Europe. In this he was flatly turned down by Molotov (of Molotov cocktail fame) who accused the United States and other Allies of trying to resurrect the “trusts and cartels” that caused the war in the first place, and once more he demanded half of the $20 billion reparations immediately, even if German homes and families had to be stripped of their possessions.
Marshall pointed out that if Germany were forced to pay reparations now, the United States would have to provide it aid, which would mean that in effect the reparations would be paid by the American taxpayer. But, like the others, this argument fell on deaf ears.
The talks deadlocked for weeks, and Marshall finally began to come to the conclusion that many had reached some time ago: the Soviets had no intention of cooperating with any plan that might help put capitalist western Europe back on its feet. In fact, the opposite was true; their interests lay in a poverty-stricken Europe all the more vulnerable to Communist entreaties or subversion.
Marshall’s naivete vis-à-vis the Russians is difficult to understand. Perhaps the best explanation is that, during the war, the Soviet Union were allies, and as such were relatively easy to work with—even if somewhat demanding and strange. From the Russian Revolution of 1917 until World War II, Communist Russia had been a kind of black hole from which little light had emanated, but it was not known as a particularly expansive or dangerous country.
In fact, it had engaged in a good deal of espionage in the United States through its affiliate Communist Party USA, confirming the age-old maxim that friends do not spy on friends. But after war broke out this same Soviet Union burst upon the world as a victim of Hitler’s duplicity (putting aside for a moment the fact that it had only recently signed a mutual nonaggression pact with the Nazi government) and became in the American mind a friend and ally against a wicked foe. It emerged from the war as a major world power but, to the consternation of many, began gobbling up its neighbors and exporting communism at a cosmic rate. It took a while for some to appreciate that—including George C. Marshall.
In those early years following the war, Marshall seemed somehow unable or unwilling to grasp the concept that, far from being allies, the Russians had now become rapacious enemies, and dangerous. He took seriously his change of missions from being America’s top military man—who had trained most of his life not only to project power but to use it—to becoming America’s top diplomat, who believed that with diplomacy he could sweet-talk the Russians into being reasonable toward their fellow Allies’ point of view. Or perhaps he was simply not ready to believe they were a menace.
The final straw was over Austrian reparations. Molotov wanted to strip the country of all its manufacturing, which the Austrians had barely gotten repaired and running again since the war ended. American military administrators in Germany and Austria, who had been dealing with the Soviets on a daily basis for nearly two years, were for taking a hard line with the Russians, but the State Department was inclined to appease them. Marshall felt caught in the middle. He knew and trusted the generals who were governing the former Axis countries but was loath to go against the diplomats who advised giving Russia what she asked.
General Mark Clark, one of Marshall’s old friends and the military administrator of Austria, was adamant about not letting the Communists strip the country. They had already pillaged millions of dollars’ worth of factories, he said, “then left them to rust away on railroad sidings on the frontiers of the Soviet Union.” Moreover, Clark might have been furious at the Communists for having discovered that rooms at the U.S. embassy in Moscow were bugged. He handed Marshall a position paper, which everyone knew the Russians would not agree to. “I’ve been working with these devils for two years,” he told the secretary of state to his face, “and you can no more give in to them than the man in the moon. If you do you will sacrifice all we’ve been fighting for, what thousands of men have died for.”3
At the conference that afternoon, as Molotov continued denouncing the United States and Great Britain, Marshall pulled out Clark’s position paper and read it. The Soviet minister walked out and the conference ended in a deadlock, the last formal conference the United States would have with the Russians for fifteen years.4
WHILE HE WAS IN EUROPE, Marshall traveled around and was appalled by what he saw—wrecked homes and buildings, people on the verge of starvation, inflation, recession, black markets, begging in the streets, and black despair. He began to realize that if something were not done to alleviate the situation Europe might fall into the abyss.
By this time, following the death of Franklin Roosevelt, politically, the honeymoon was over for Harry S. Truman. Marshall knew that, in the present air of austerity, Congress was unlikely to make any large appropriations in the president’s name to assist the situation in Europe. So on June 5, 1947, at the graduation ceremonies at Harvard where he was receiving an honorary degree, Marshall surprised the world by announcing the need for a European recovery program led by the United States.
It was broad, expansive, and expensive. All European nations were invited to participate, including the Soviet Union and its new satellites, though Marshall added, “Any government that maneuvers to block the recovery of other countries cannot expect help from us.”
The Europeans that applied for help, he said, must come up with their own plan, and America would support the program “as far as it may be practical for us to do so.”
European reporters had been alerted to the speech and it caused a great stir in the press. One of Truman’s advisers suggested to his boss it ought to be named the Truman Plan, but the president was politically savvy enough to know that would be difficult if not impossible to get past the
Republicans in Congress. “Call it the Marshall Plan,” Truman said.
Marshall testified before the appropriations committee and, shortly afterward, the money was forthcoming. Americans had read of the destitution in Europe and were in the mood to help. In the end, seventeen countries participated to the tune of $17 billion over four years.‡ The Marshall Plan was credited with speeding the European recovery by perhaps a decade. The Soviet Union declined to participate and refused to let its satellite countries do so, dooming them to even more backwardness than the Communist economic system that held them down. Marshall for the second time became Time’s Man of the Year in 1947, and six years later he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his postwar work.
THE FOLLOWING YEAR, the British mandate to administer Palestine—stemming from an Allied decision after World War I—was set to expire on May 15, 1948, and the Palestinian Jews were prepared to partition the country and establish a Jewish state. Marshall was staunchly against the idea. He worried about alienating the oil-rich Middle East countries, which might cut the oil supply if the United States supported the Jews. He also worried that the Russians would find ways to exploit Arab unrest, but foremost—and he was vocal about it—he feared that a massacre was inevitable given that Jews in Palestine were outnumbered about one hundred to one by Arabs in the region, who also were heavily armed.
“You have Arab states all around you,” Marshall told a Jewish leader referring to a map, “and your backs are to the sea.” Should the Jews partition, “then war would surely come,” he said. Then, Marshall predicted, the United States would probably have to intervene on a humanitarian basis to prevent annihilation, “which had no logic in terms of [American] foreign policy.”