The first two things MacArthur did were to liberate the Allied POW camps and round up and try Japanese war criminals. The most egregious of these—General Tojo, for instance, convicted of initiating the Pearl Harbor attack, and General Yamashita, whom MacArthur wrongly blamed for the destruction and wanton killing in Manila—were hanged. General Homma, of Bataan Death March infamy, was shot at his own request by firing squad. Some twenty-five major war criminals were put to death in this manner. Others received long prison sentences, and thousands of so-called militarists and their followers were, like the German Nazis, purged from government work, schools, and other responsible employment.
Some four million Japanese soldiers were brought home from China and the far-flung islands of what had been the Imperial Japanese Empire and demobilized. The army was disarmed and dispersed on MacArthur’s order and the means for making war destroyed. Likewise, the Kempeitai, or “thought police,” the Japanese equivalent of the Gestapo, were disbanded; Japanese military secret societies that had wielded extraordinary political powers were abolished. The people were told they were free to think or say anything they wished.
Shinto, or worship of the emperor as a state religion, was abolished without a peep from the people. MacArthur ignored a clamor from some quarters—notably the Soviet Union—to try the emperor with a mind toward hanging him. Members of MacArthur’s staff urged him to call on the emperor “as a show of power,” but this MacArthur declined. He was certain that in time the emperor would come to visit him.
He was right. One day the emperor appeared, wearing of all things a cutaway, striped pants, and a silk top hat. MacArthur broke the ice by reminding him that he, himself, as a young army lieutenant, had been received by the emperor’s father when he and his own father paid a visit to Japan in 1906 at the close of the Russo-Japanese War. The emperor, to MacArthur’s astonishment, said that he had come “to bear sole responsibility for every political and military action taken by my people in the conduct of war.” He was in fact offering himself up as the top war criminal.
“A tremendous impression swept me,” MacArthur wrote afterward. “This courageous assumption of a responsibility implicit with death … moved me to the very marrow of my bones. In that instant I knew I faced the First Gentleman of Japan in his own right.”19
On New Year’s Day, 1946, Emperor Hirohito made a national radio speech declaring that he was not divine and that the Japanese “should not consider themselves a superior race with a mission to dominate the world.” Kenney pointed out, somewhat snidely, that most Japanese had privately reached that conclusion on August 14, 1945 (the day of Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allies).20
Having thus cleaned house, MacArthur embarked on the task of rebuilding and rejuvenating the country in an image he felt would be peaceful and prosperous among the community of nations. He was well aware of the ill-fated history of conquerors occupying foreign lands—including the blunders of Caesar and Napoleon—and was determined to allow the Japanese as much leeway as possible as quickly as possible to generate an economy.
In the back of every Japanese mind was the notion that Americans were a rapacious robbing, raping, murdering class of thugs, a propaganda theme that had been drummed into them since the war began. Thus, early upon his arrival, MacArthur issued a public statement: “[America] is not concerned about how to keep Japan down, but how to get her on her feet again.”
Baron Kijuro Shidehara, a respected diplomat, was appointed prime minister and a governing arrangement was contemplated along the lines of the British parliamentary system. To initiate reforms, MacArthur instructed Shidehara to get with his people and draw up a constitution—actually a revision of an existing constitution—similar in nature to the Constitution of the United States. But, as many people have pointed out, it was one that belied the heavy hand of MacArthur himself in its language. It was astonishingly liberal from the Japanese point of view, for the people had been under the relentless thumb of the military for as long as anyone could remember.
Women, for example, for the first time were given the right to vote. People were for the first time granted rights similar to those in the U.S. Bill of Rights—freedom of speech, thought, assembly, and religion. The Japanese press, which had long been constrained by total censorship, was now unleashed.
The big Japanese family financial and industrial clans were broken up—Mitsubishi, Toyoda, etc.—as were the feudal landowning families. The peasant farmer class was given small ownership allotments of land, thus turning them into instant capitalists. In addition, MacArthur ordered the school curriculum liberalized, encouraged labor unions, and abolished child labor practices.
Soon Japan began to come alive. Its heavy industry was destroyed but it began making toys and china pottery to sell abroad. These items started to appear in U.S. five-and-dime stores marked “Made in Occupied Japan.”
The Russians and British had been pushing to divide Japan into three zones of occupation, as had been done in Germany, but MacArthur refused to allow it on grounds of the disappointing mess that dividing Germany had continued to cause. The Russians were persistent, but after the Potsdam Conference had turned out in favor of the Soviets, MacArthur was determined not to let the Russians “have any part in the control of Japan.”
Prime Minister Shidehara sought an audience with MacArthur to test a novel idea. When the new constitution was finalized, he said, the framers would like to include a clause that actually abolished war. MacArthur was in full concurrence.
“For years,” he told the prime minister, “I have believed that war should be abolished as a means of resolving disputes between nations. Probably no living man has seen as much of war and destruction than I have. I have fought with or against the soldiers of practically every country and my abhorrence reached its height with the perfection of the atomic bomb.” Shidehara was so overcome by MacArthur’s answer that he had to leave the office. Tears rushed down his face, and he turned and said, “The world will laugh and mock us as impractical visionaries, but a hundred years from now we will be called prophets.”21
A general election was held on April 10, 1946. Thirteen million women registered to vote for the first time, which “changed the whole complexion of Japanese political life,” MacArthur said. “Farmers, teachers, laboring men and doctors now sat in the house once dominated by lawyers and industrialists.”
The day after the results were announced, however, MacArthur received a call from an extremely dignified but distraught Japanese legislator. “I regret to say that something terrible has happened,” the man said. “A prostitute, Your Excellency, has been elected to the House of Representatives.”
“How many votes did she receive?” MacArthur inquired.
“Two hundred and fifty-six thousand,” came the embarrassed answer.
“Then I should say there must be more than her dubious occupation involved,” MacArthur told the chagrined politician.22
The inclusion of women in the electorate boded for larger reforms. There had been no coeducation of women in Japan but women now sought equality of education and got it, as well as maternity leave, abolition of contract marriages, and the end of “concubinage.”
Because the agricultural and transportation systems had completely broken down, MacArthur in the first year of occupation had to import some three and a half million tons of food from the United States to keep the people from starvation. The financial system had also disintegrated, and the national debt was astronomical. MacArthur decided to start over, beginning with a more equitable revision of the income tax laws.
MacArthur’s promotion of labor unions got off to a sensational start. By 1947 there were approximately twenty-five thousand unions in Japan, divided into leftist and rightest groups—the former often infiltrated by Communists who continued to give MacArthur trouble. The unions often went on strike, with occasional bemusing results. In a theatrical union, a chorus line went on half-strike by kicking only half as high as they usually did. A
railroad union broadcast its disapproval by blowing the whistle on all the trains in Japan at the same time for a full minute.
IN 1948, THE REPUBLIC OF KOREA, a capitalist democracy, was proclaimed south of the 38th parallel, with Syngman Rhee as its president. Its status as an independent nation was recognized by the new United Nations, of which it became a member. But in neighboring China events were not proceeding as well. Chiang Kai-shek continued to battle the Communists who, MacArthur said sarcastically, were still known to the U.S. State Department as “agrarian reformers.” Slowly Chiang’s troops had given way, until at last, in 1949, they were forced onto the large island of Formosa (Taiwan) more than a hundred miles off the Chinese coast.
MacArthur railed publicly and privately that the entire U.S. mission in the Far East had been compromised. He pointed out that since November 26, 1941, the fundamental policy of the U.S. government was the independence of China, and that this (among other policy statements) led directly to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He lamented the reversal of that policy to a strategy of appeasement of the Red Chinese and predicted that “its consequences will be felt for centuries and its disastrous effects on the fortunes of the free world are yet to be unfolded.”23
In the dark early morning of June 25, 1950, MacArthur answered the phone in his quarters to be told by the duty office that hordes of North Korean troops, spearheaded by a legion of Soviet-made tanks, had crashed through the border at the 38th parallel. They were sweeping aside South Korean defenses and overwhelming all opposition. MacArthur, who recalled a similar dead-of-night phone call a decade before in Manila, was furious—and not just at the Communists.
His Eighth Army occupying Japan was only a shell of a complete army prepared for combat. His intelligence section had for months been warning of an intense buildup of North Korean troops (Korean People’s Army or KPA) at South Korea’s border. It fell on deaf ears at the American State Department and White House. Five years earlier, America was by far the strongest country in the world militarily, a virtual arsenal of democracy, that had now, according to MacArthur, “been frittered away in a bankruptcy of courageous leadership.”
South Korea had four infantry divisions but, at the behest of the U.S. State Department, they were lightly equipped with no tanks, artillery, air force, or navy—to keep them from attacking the North Koreans. This, MacArthur said, of course encouraged the North Koreans, and now the South was reaping the whirlwind. The United Nations—with Russia unable to veto because it was boycotting the UN in protest of its recognition of China’s national government—voted to help South Korea resist aggression. President Truman interpreted this to mean immediate military assistance by United States naval and air forces.
MacArthur was tasked with the job.
On June 28 he climbed aboard the Bataan and flew to Korea, landing thirty miles south of Seoul, the capital, which could be seen burning in the distance. In a commandeered jeep, he then headed toward the scene of battle, arriving at the Han River to encounter the last vestiges of the defeated and disorganized South Korean army, preceded by tens of thousands of refugees, who clogged the roads in a great “writhing, dust-shrouded mass of humanity.”
MacArthur telegraphed Washington that, given the force and power of the North Korean thrust, only the inclusion of U.S. ground forces could stop the enemy advance. The next day Truman authorized it, and America went to war on the policy statement of a president, with no congressional debate or approval.
MacArthur’s only chance was more a tactic than a strategy: to commit his army piecemeal as fast as he could from Japan to Korea. The Eighth Army contained four divisions, each understrength by about one-third, with light, not heavy, tanks and light, not heavy, artillery. The 24th Division was landed in Korea first. Without adequate antitank and heavy weapons to match the two hundred Russian tanks the North Koreans employed, they fought a running delaying action southward and lost nearly five thousand men killed, wounded, or captured. They managed to form and hold a defensive perimeter at Pusan, in the far southern part of Korea, a foothold from which MacArthur could conduct future operations. For the moment, MacArthur’s orders for the perimeter were “to stand or die.” The remainder of South Korea, meanwhile, was conceded to the Communists.
All the while, MacArthur was studying ways to expel the North Koreans from the country. The demilitarization of the military under Truman had been so severe that there wasn’t enough shipping to deploy the kinds of forces needed, nor were there adequate forces themselves. He conceived a scheme to land a combination of marines, U.S. soldiers, and South Korean units at the port of Inchon, close to Seoul, that would trap the Communist forces between themselves and the Pusan defenders. It was a daring stratagem that was at first turned down by those in Washington as too risky.
MacArthur begged for and got a conference in Tokyo consisting of the highest-ranking army, navy, marine, and air force representatives. The navy men argued that Inchon’s twenty- to thirty-foot tides created enormous, unnavigable mudflats that jutted out two miles from shore. On the target date for the landing in September, the navy said, the first high tide was reached at 6:59 a.m. and the evening tide at 7:19 p.m. Two hours after each high tide the mudflats would reappear. Thus the first assault wave would have to get ashore, push inland, secure a beachhead, and withstand counterattacks for twelve hours before more troops could be landed on the next high tide. If anything went wrong, the troops in the assault boats would be sitting ducks for enemy artillery.
The navy representative concluded, “If every possible geographic and naval handicap were listed—Inchon has ’em all.” The army chief of staff didn’t like the plan either. He called it too far to the enemy’s rear to be effective and warned that the landing force might meet with overwhelming enemy resistance and be destroyed.
Then MacArthur arose and made his argument. He said that the very objections given to abandon the idea were the ones that would make it work—namely, the element of surprise. Because of all the difficulties of an Inchon landing, he said, the North Koreans would not be expecting it. He cited in detail the capture of Quebec in the French and Indian War, in which the British won a stunning victory on the Plains of Abraham by surprising the French.
MacArthur said that by landing at Inchon he could cut the enemy’s supply line and roll him up in detail. The speech was so effective that it changed the minds of both the army and the navy representatives. On August 29 the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave MacArthur the go-ahead.
Planning and preparation proceeded apace until a week before D-day, when the Joint Chiefs got cold feet and told MacArthur they didn’t think the landing would be successful. Skeptics were calling for another Dunkirk, but MacArthur silenced them with a reply of such overwhelming confidence that they again approved the operation.
On September 12, MacArthur boarded the USS Mount McKinley, a specially designed amphibious forces command ship, for the three-day trip to the waters off of Inchon. There, in the inky darkness of the blacked-out ship, MacArthur paced the decks at 2 a.m. absorbing the tension that had been building among the 40,000-man landing party scarcely five hours from its mission. “I alone was responsible for tomorrow,” he proclaimed theatrically. “If I failed, the dreadful results would rest on judgment day against my soul.”24
THE INCHON LANDINGS WERE a complete success and perhaps MacArthur’s most brilliant accomplishment as a soldier. Total surprise was achieved. The marines quickly overcame initial opposition and the beachhead was secured. The remainder of the assault force landed at the Seoul airport, and then the city itself—or what was left of it—was captured.
At the same time, several hundred miles south, the First Cavalry Division and various support units broke out of the Pusan Perimeter and began an advance northward, pushing the surprised North Korean army before it. Now MacArthur stood astride the tenuous supply lines between North Korea and the KPA. At Osan, thirty miles south of Seoul, the First Cavalry linked up with the Seventh Infantry Division, which had
landed at Inchon and marched south. The two American divisions then threatened to trap the main Communist force in South Korea, which was being heavily damaged by U.S. air raids.
Rather than regroup for an orderly withdrawal beyond the 38th parallel, the KPA simply disintegrated; tens of thousands were captured and a mere thirty thousand managed to make their way northward. In Moscow, Joseph Stalin was furious because he had assigned Soviet military advisers to the North Korean effort.
MacArthur’s army followed, attacking and taking prisoners. It was his intention, he stated, not to simply drive the North Koreans beyond the 38th parallel but to destroy their army and reunite the two Koreas as a democracy.
On September 27, Truman sent a message telling MacArthur that he was not authorized to go north of the 38th parallel if Chinese or Russian forces had come into North Korea, or if they publicly threatened such a move. But two days later, then Secretary of Defense George Marshall told MacArthur he was authorized to proceed with “unhampered” operations beyond the dividing line.
The following day the Chinese warned they would go to war if the United States crossed the 38th parallel. Nevertheless, on October 7, with sanction from the United Nations, MacArthur crossed the parallel into North Korea. Stalin secretly asked the Chinese to join the fight.
With Stalin’s blessing, Mao Tse-tung ordered a 200,000-man Red Chinese army to prepare for an invasion of Korea. This army moved to the Manchurian–North Korea border by night to avoid detection.
On October 15, MacArthur flew to Wake Island for a conference during which he assured President Truman there was little chance the Chinese would intervene in Korea. By then the United States and the South Koreans had been joined by troops from Great Britain and Turkey. Truman insisted on calling it a United Nations “police action.”
When he returned, MacArthur’s intelligence section informed him that thousands of Red Chinese “volunteers” were infiltrating North Korea by way of the Yalu River. He asked his superiors in Washington for permission to destroy the Yalu bridges from the air, but this was denied for fear of provoking a Chinese intervention. After protesting the decision MacArthur was told he could bomb the southern part of the bridges but not the half attached to Red China. He protested further that he had never figured out how to bomb “half a bridge.”