But there were no incidents there. Indeed, “the attitude of the enemy,” reported Theodore H. White, then a correspondent for Time and Life, “was very curious. They acted as if we were partners in a common cause. Japs saluted us; we saluted them. Domei correspondents and photographers covered Atsugi airfield. Japanese diplomats and newsmen shook the hands of American correspondents, and interpreters rushed back and forth, smiling, beaming with intensity their goodwill.” U.S. officers were still tense; they knew that twenty-two enemy divisions—300,000 well-trained soldiers—were within a few hours’ marching distance. This was MacArthur’s first shoestring operation since the defense of Port Moresby, and it depended entirely on trust in a people who had proved themselves capable of deceit. Yet the mood of the Japanese continued to be propitiatory, even euphoric. They cheered when technicians removed the propellers from row upon row of silvery, stubby kamikaze planes. They cheered again when GIs hoisted the Stars and Stripes over a battered hangar. An American remarked that the thousands of black cracks on the runway reminded him of a crazy quilt, and they cheered that, too. After dark the saluting and handshaking went on, weirdly illuminated by blood-red flames from a charred hulk still burning defiantly at the north end of the field, perhaps a victim of the last B-29 attack. But apart from the hoarse hurrahs of the Japanese and the coughing of men choked by the acrid smoke, there were few sounds at Atsugi as night deepened. “It seemed impossible,” an officer remembers, “that so brutal a war could end so quietly.”132
Eichelberger, who was to precede the General, rose in Manila at four-thirty Thursday morning. As his plane, the Miss Em, descended over Honshu, languid mists drifted upward, and sunlight glinted on the rice paddies below and on red markers staked out by Tench’s men at either end of the bumpy Atsugi runway. Taxiing in, Miss Em’s pilot muttered, “Nobody but a kamikaze would dare land on this strip.” MacArthur had told the field commander that he wanted to check into Yokohama’s New Grand Hotel at two o’clock that afternoon. Eichelberger established a perimeter defense around the hotel with five hundred veteran paratroopers in jungle greens, but the more he heard about the violent Sonno Joi Gigun youths, the more apprehensive he became. He radioed Manila, urging the General to delay his arrival by two days. MacArthur’s staff unanimously seconded the motion, and he, as usual, overrode their objections. Afterward he wrote that they had argued that “for the supreme commander, a handful of his staff, and a small advance party to land unarmed and unescorted where they would be outnumbered by thousands to one was foolhardy. But years of overseas duty had schooled me well in the lessons of the Orient and, what was probably more important, had taught the Far East that I was its friend.” That is unconvincing. The past four years had taught the Japanese that he could be anything but friendly. Probably he had at least two other motives. This would be his last opportunity in the war to display his indifference to danger. And it was now clear that he had to hurry if he wanted to beat the U.S. Navy into Yokohama. On Monday Halsey had begun moving into Sagami Bay, southwest of the city, gliding over a glassy sea past the rugged, jagged, black-sanded coastline of Kamakura, the great muzzles of his warships pointing toward the Kanto Plain, where the General had expected to lose 100,000 GIs in combat. At six o’clock that morning the 4th Marines had begun pouring ashore, spiking the harbor guns. A grinning marine officer told Eichelberger that the “first wave was made up entirely of admirals trying to get ashore before MacArthur.”133
But it was one thing for heavily armed, massed marines to execute a cutting-out operation under the protective guns of battleships; for an unarmed five-star general to drop out of the sky into the midst of a nation of seventy millions who, until two weeks ago, had been pledged to his annihilation, was another matter. Later Winston Churchill said: “Of all the amazing deeds in the war, I regard General MacArthur’s personal landing at Atsugi as the bravest of the lot.” John Gunther wrote: “Professors who studied Japan all their lives, military experts who knew every nook and cranny of the Japanese character, thought that MacArthur was taking a frightful risk.” In Manila Sutherland remonstrated: “My God, General, the emperor is worshipped as a real god, yet they still tried to assassinate him. What kind of a target does that make you?” MacArthur replied that he believed the reported attempt on Hirohito’s life was spurious—he was right, although there was no way of knowing it then—and when his C-54, with “Bataan” emblazoned on its nose, touched down for a brief stop on Okinawa, and he noticed that Kenney and the others were strapping on pistols in shoulder holsters, he said, “Take them off. If they intend to kill us, sidearms will be useless. And nothing will impress them like a show of absolute fearlessness. If they don’t know they’re licked, this will convince them.”134
He began the five-hour hop to Honshu, pacing the aisle in his inimitable fashion, dictating random thoughts to Whitney, and jabbing the air with his pipe for emphasis. Then he sat down, lay back, and fell asleep. As they soared over Kamakura’s thirteenth-century, fifty-foot bronze Buddha, and the softly symmetrical white cone of Fujiyama, rising serenely from its cloud-shrouded base, Whitney whispered to another officer, “Wake the old man up.” The officer didn’t dare, so Whitney gently tapped the General on the arm and, as he stirred, pointed to the sacred mountain outside. “Well, good old Fuji!” MacArthur said. “How beautiful! Court, did you ever have a dream come true?” Then he closed his eyes and drifted off again while Whitney, as he wrote afterward, wondered about the reception awaiting them at Atsugi and “held my breath. I think the whole world was holding its breath.”135
Certainly Eichelberger was. He watched anxiously from the ground as the plane skidded over the airstrip at 2:05 P.M. in what he called “a rubbery landing.” Later he said that the General’s refusal to wait until the area was secure “worried me. The safety of the Supreme Commander was my responsibility, and I knew that our airborne troops could not . . . arrive in sufficient numbers to provide adequate protection.” Worse, he had just heard a rumor that a group of kamikaze pilots, who had already received the last rites for the dead customary before the final takeoff of suicide pilots, was in the neighborhood. Japanese police had attempted to take them into custody; they had fought back; both sides had suffered casualties; some of them might be lurking near the airport. None were, but he didn’t know it at the time, so he bit his lip as a ramp was wheeled toward the C-54. Some two hundred newsmen and photographers, mostly Japanese, dashed toward it. As the door opened a paratrooper band struck up a lively march. MacArthur took two steps down, puffed twice on his corncob, and then paused in a dramatic pose for the cameramen, the pipe and his cap set at jaunty angles.136
Descending, he smartly returned Eichelberger’s salute and shook his hand. He said, “Well, Bob, it’s been a long road from Melbourne to Tokyo, but as they say in the movies, this is the payoff.” (Afterward Eichelberger wrote, “I thought it was too. But I wasn’t quite sure what the payoff would be.”) In high good humor, the General strolled over to the bandleader and told him, “Thank you very much. I want you to tell the band that that’s about the sweetest music I’ve ever heard.” A group of enlisted men stood nearby. He crossed to speak to them. A sergeant reached for his rifle to present arms and, by mistake, grabbed a bamboo pole. MacArthur paused in front of him and said quietly, “Son, I think you’re in the wrong army.” The sergeant gasped, “Yes, sir.” The General moved on, chuckling.137
More comedy followed. Transport was needed to reach their billets in the New Grand Hotel, fifteen miles away. Anticipating this, Manila had instructed Tokyo to provide the General and his party with fifty chauffeured automobiles. But LeMay’s bombers hadn’t left that many serviceable vehicles in all Yokohama. Only one was in decent shape, an American Lincoln of doubtful vintage which MacArthur and Eichelberger now entered. For the rest of the Americans, the Japanese had assembled a preposterous fleet of decrepit, charcoal-burning sedans and trucks, led by a bright red fire engine which reminded one officer of the Toonerville Trolley. With an eruption of stu
ttering manifolds and sizzling charcoal, they were off. The fire engine had a splendid siren—in fact, it couldn’t be turned off— but its motor kept breaking down. Thus the ludicrous caravan proceeded under a punishing sun as the machines stalled and lurched, stalled and lurched, for nearly two hours.138
No one complained, because the Japanese had diverted their attention with another surprise. Over thirty thousand Nipponese infantrymen lined both sides of the dusty road. Bayonets fixed, they stood at parade rest, one every few feet, their backs turned to the motorcade. That was a sign of submission and profound respect—until now troops had averted their faces only for the emperor—and “in addition,” as Kenney later learned, “they had been ordered to guard against the possibility that some unreconstructed Jap might take a shot at us.” Nevertheless, the sight of so many enemy soldiers made most of the Americans edgy. Mischief seemed possible; even probable. Eichelberger felt “grim . . . . I had heard about the discipline of the Nipponese people, but I also knew that one undisciplined fanatic with a rifle could turn a peaceful occupation into a punitive expedition.” Whitney would remember regarding “these formidable looking troops with a wary eye. My misgivings were not put at rest by this display because 1 could not help wondering whether . . . there was some . . . deep-seated, mysterious, ulterior motive.” Only MacArthur sat back serenely to enjoy the view.139
MacArthur lands in Japan, August 30, 1945
As they approached the city’s outskirts it became less enjoyable. B-29s had wrought terrible havoc here. To Whitney it seemed “a phantom city. Shop windows were boarded up, blinds were drawn.” Eichelberger later wrote that “the damage and desolation gave us an accurate picture of what we were to find in all the large cities of Japan and a forecast of the occupation’s economic difficulties. Only the temple cities of Nara, Kyoto, and Nikko had entirely escaped the wrath of our bombers. In Yokohama some of the largest structures had survived, but we learned that a single fire-bomb raid—on May 29, 1945—had destroyed eighty percent of the city.” The few people on the streets as the procession passed were dressed in rags. Here and there MacArthur saw emaciated, harrowing faces peering out at him through jumbles of fragmented masonry. He began to wonder about their destination. It seemed inconceivable that a hotel could have survived in all this.140
But it had, and an elderly Japanese in a wing collar, swallow-tailed coat, and pin-striped trousers was waiting at the entrance. He bowed deeply as MacArthur stepped from the Lincoln and identified himself as Yozo Nomura. The General asked, “How long have you been the manager of this hotel?” Nomura hastily corrected him: “I am not the manager. I am the owner.” Feeling absurd, as he later recalled, he continued: “Welcome. I wish to offer my respects to you. During your stay, we’ll do our best to service you and I hope you’ll like the room I’m going to show you.” Then, with many more bows, he led MacArthur to room 315, which, with connecting chambers, provided the hotel’s best suite. The General asked everyone to leave and lay down, hoping to resume his nap. It was impossible. The corridors were in turmoil as over a hundred lesser officers jockeyed for rooms. Rising, MacArthur rang for service, and three maids scurried in like flustered butterflies, followed by Nomura, who bowed once again and inquired whether the General wished to dine in a private room. No, MacArthur said; he would eat in the main dining room with his staff.141
They were served steaks. Whitney thought MacArthur’s might be poisoned and suggested that a Japanese taste it first. MacArthur laughed and shook his head; it was good meat and he didn’t want to share it with anyone. The gesture did not pass unnoticed. The hotel staff had anticipated Whitney’s suspicion and expected a tasting of the General’s food. Nomura reappeared at his table to express gratitude for this demonstration of “great trust.” He and his employees, he said, were “honored beyond belief.” MacArthur was obviously delighted by this little speech. His officers wondered why. It seemed a very small matter. But the General knew that word of everything he said and did would quickly spread throughout the country. He was determined that the occupation be benign from the outset. Moreover, remembering his tour of duty in Germany after the 1918 Armistice, he realized that in a war-torn, defeated country, food would be at a premium. He sensed that the acquisition of these steaks had been no small matter, that all Japan must be hungry, a surmise which was confirmed at breakfast the next morning, when the commander of the nth Airborne ruefully reported that his division had searched all night and found exactly one egg for the Supreme Commander’s breakfast. MacArthur immediately issued an order at odds with the whole history of conquering armies in Asia. Occupation troops were forbidden to consume local victuals; they would eat only their own rations. An hour later, he canceled the martial law and curfew decrees Eichelberger had imposed on the city. The first step in the reformation of Japan, he said, would be an exhibition of generosity and compassion by the occupying power.142
That evening he was sitting down to his second dinner in the hotel when an aide reported that he had a visitor outside: Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright. Liberated from his Manchurian prisoner-of-war camp by the Russians four days earlier, the man the General had left in command on the Rock in 1942 had traveled by a wooden-seat train to Mukden and then by a C-47 transport via Chungking and Manila, where Sid Huff had escorted him to a barber and a Filipino tailor. He was a ghastly spectacle nevertheless. In MacArthur’s words, “I rose and started for the lobby, but before I could reach it, the door swung open and there was Wainwright. He was haggard and aged. . . . He walked with difficulty and with the help of a cane. His eyes were sunken and there were pits in his cheeks. His hair was snow white and his skin looked like old shoe leather. He made a brave effort to smile as I took him in my arms, but when he tried to talk his voice wouldn’t come. For three years he had imagined himself in disgrace for having surrendered Corregidor. He believed he would never again be given an active command. This shocked me. ‘Why, Jim,’ I said, your old corps is yours when you want it: ”143
Wainwright said, “General . . .” Then his voice wavered and he burst into tears. Afterward he couldn’t say which had touched him most: the restoration of his dignity and self-esteem or the sound of his most private nickname, which few knew and which MacArthur hadn’t even used in their last desperate meeting on Corregidor. The General was equally moved. He could neither finish his meal nor, as he told an aide in the morning, fall asleep afterward. Something in the dining room reunion troubled him, and he couldn’t put his finger on it. Then it came to him. It was the brown walnut cane with the curved handle. He had given it to Wainwright in prewar Manila, expecting him to use it as he had used his own—as a commander’s stage prop, a swagger stick. Instead it had supported the dwindling weight of a whipped man, suffering torments of shame through those years of humiliation when he had been unable to lean upon anything else, not even pride.144
Early Sunday morning, two days later, a destroyer took Wainwright out to the slate-gray, forty-five-thousand-ton battleship Missouri, in Tokyo Bay. The ship, he thought, was “the most startling weapon of war I have ever seen. I simply could not believe that anything could be so huge, so studded with guns.” As he climbed the starboard ladder he heard a familiar voice roar from above, “Hello, Skinny!” It was Halsey, whom he had not seen since the early 1930s, when he was a lieutenant colonel and Halsey a commander. The admiral reached down to pump his hand, led him to the quarterdeck, and showed him where he could stand during the coming surrender ceremony. Wainwright and Percival, the Briton who had surrendered Singapore, were to occupy positions of honor, flanking MacArthur and a step behind him. Behind them and on either side, forming a U, were Allied generals and admirals: red-tabbed Englishmen, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders; Russians in red-striped trousers; Chinese in olive-drab uniforms; the Dutch in their quaint caps; and row upon row of Americans in khaki. In the mouth of the U stood a microphone, an old mess table covered with green baize, and chairs on both sides of the table. The Japanese would stand on the f
ar side, facing the General. Scaffolding had been erected for war correspondents and cameramen; every inch of the gun turrets and the decks overhead was crammed with gobs in immaculate white, many holding Kodaks and all craning their necks for a glimpse of MacArthur, who had come aboard earlier and was now striding in the admiral’s cabin below. Overhead the General’s five-star flag, with Nimitz’s five stars beside it, floated beneath the American flag which had flown over the Capitol in Washington on December 7, 1941.145
MacArthur embraces the freed Jonathan M. Wainwright
Afterward the memories of both victors and vanquished would agree about everything that happened that day except the weather and the date. Eichelberger, who was piped aboard a few minutes after 8:00 A.M., escorted by Commander Harold Stassen, thought the quarterdeck “as hot in the sunlight as the top side of a kitchen range, ‘ while the Japanese diplomat who had been appointed to draw up an official report of the day’s events for the Imperial Palace, Toshikazu Kase, a gnomish graduate of Amherst and Harvard and the secretary to Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu, would remember it as a “surprisingly cool day for early September.” To the Occidentals it was September 2, 1945, but Nipponese accounts referred to it as “the second day of the ninth month of the twentieth year of Showa, being the two thousand six hundred and fifth from the Accession of the Emperor Jimmu.” It hardly mattered. By any reckoning the day would be memorable. As Eichelberger put it, “I had the eerie feeling that we were walking through the pages of history.”146