Supreme Commander (46 page)

MacArthur headquarters at the Dai Ichi Building. No checkpoints or fences were needed.

 

Under MacArthur, counter to the prevailing practices of the time, women were given a prominent role in the occupation.

 

Protecting Japan from nearby Russia proved to be MacArthur's greatest challenge.

 

MacArthur and John Foster Dulles.

 

MacArthur with an aide in his office.

 

“The Nuremberg of the East.” The trial of Japanese war criminals lasted thirty-one months; all twenty-five defendants were found guilty.

 

John Foster Dulles and William Sebald talking with Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida.

 

“Sayonara!”
As MacArthur leaves Japan, 200,000 people line the streets to say farewell.

About the Author

SEYMOUR MORRIS JR.
is the author of
American History Revised: 200 Startling Facts That Never Made It into the Textbooks
. He is also an international business entrepreneur and the former head of corporate communications for the world's largest management consulting firm. A resident of New York City, he holds an A.B. and M.B.A. from Harvard University.

 

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American History Revised

Credits

Cover design by Richard Ljoenes

Cover photograph © AP Photo

Copyright

SUPREME COMMANDER.
Copyright © 2014 by Seymour Morris Jr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

 

“Assistant Cooks” cartoon: Fred O. Siebel cartoon is reproduced with permission of the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

 

“Japanese thinking” illustration: from Courtney Whitney,
MacArthur: His Rendezvous with History
, page 252.

 

MacArthur/Marshall cartoon: 1951 Herblock Cartoon, © The Herb Block foundation.

 

FIRST EDITION

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

 

ISBN: 978-0-06-228793-9

EPUB Edition MAY 2014 ISBN 9780062287953

 

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*
For his honors and medals, see
chapter 5
. For a critical view of MacArthur as a general, see books by Eric Larrabee (1987) and Thomas Ricks (2012).

 

*
This claim was not as preposterous as it seems. The Japanese people had never before heard the emperor's voice on the radio. (For most of the American military, used to American radio and FDR's “fireside chats,” this came as a shock.)

 

*
The only other father-son besides Arthur MacArthur and Douglas MacArthur who have received the Medal of Honor are the son Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and then his father (posthumously).

 

*
MacArthur was unusually solicitous of the lives of his men. He believed in outsmarting the enemy, not bludgeoning the enemy with superior numbers of manpower at the cost of heavy casualties. In this he was the opposite of Grant, who could lose ten thousand men in a battle and not think twice about it. The first thing most commanders do when they start their day is study the latest battlefield reports and where their troops and the enemy's are configured. Not MacArthur. He would study the latest fatality reports, slowly reading the name of every soldier killed, line by line. It was his way—painful though it might be—of reminding himself of his fundamental responsibility as a general: to protect his men. They all knew this, and respected him for it. To serve under MacArthur was considered a privilege, as good a chance as any they would return home alive.

 

*
In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the death tolls were originally estimated to be 80,000 and 40,000. More recent estimates place the total for the two cities at over 200,000.

 

*
By the time his career was over, five-star general Douglas MacArthur would be the recipient of forty medals and decorations: the Medal of Honor, a Presidential Unit Citation, a UN Service Medal, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army Distinguished Service Medal, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, the Air Medal, the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, a National Defense Service Medal, the Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart, along with thirty-four orders, decorations, and service medals from foreign countries. The changing nature of warfare today from total to limited wars means that there will never be a general so decorated as MacArthur.

He is not, however, the highest-ranking general. That distinction belongs to George Washington, who was posthumously awarded six stars by Congress in 1976, with the understanding that no general may ever outrank him.

 

*
MacArthur ruled Japan for slightly less than five years (from August 30, 1945, to June 25, 1950). After the Korean War started, his efforts were devoted almost entirely to the war, until he was relieved on April 11, 1951.

 

*
Upon returning to his palace, the emperor asked who that friendly man was who had put out his hand to greet him when he got out of his limousine. He reciprocated by sending Fellers a signed photograph of himself.

 

*
Which is exactly what happened in America's next major military occupation. In 2003 in Iraq, President Bush abruptly fired Gen. Jay Garner after three weeks and installed the inexperienced, politically connected Paul Bremer as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

 

*
MacArthur had four titles: SCAP, CINCUNC (Commander in Chief, United Nations Command), CINCFE (Commander in Chief, Far East), and CGFEC (Commanding General, Far East Command). He was running the occupation of Japan, the deployment of U.S. troops in Okinawa and Taiwan, the use of Allied troops in Japan and Korea, and the naval and air forces stationed in the Far East.

 

*
In his 1964 memoir MacArthur would continue this fiction of noninvolvement. He wrote that the emperor had issued the rescript renouncing his divinity “without any suggestion or discussion with me.”

 

*
The complexity of the Japanese language was used as a tool by the Japanese government to control the people and keep them in ignorance and abeyance. There are 56,000 kanji ideographs in the classical Japanese language. To read a newspaper, one needs to know 2,400 of them. Yet most Japanese people (primary-school graduates) know only 600. SCAP conducted tests of primary-school children studying phonetic Japanese and found that in just two weeks they reached the same level of literacy as students studying kanji for six years. SCAP's efforts to promote the use of phonetic Japanese (romaji) were largely unavailing. Observed
Time
bureau chief Richard Lauterbach: “The Old Guard claimed that the large number of homonyms in the language would lead to ambiguity. And so millions of new textbooks were ordered in the old-style calligraphy. It was a victory for the traditionalists.” Added the educator John Ashmead in a January 1947 issue of the
Atlantic Monthly
: “We may be able, by using the radio, to democratize Japan to a limited extent. But much of our present effort to re-educate the Japanese is just money down the drain.”

 

*
The marriage lasted seven years. MacArthur's second marriage, in 1937 at the age of fifty-seven, lasted until his death in 1964.

 

*
George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, and Benjamin Harrison. Another president who was prominent for his military exploits was Theodore Roosevelt in Cuba, though he was never a general.

 

*
This propaganda bluff boomeranged after the Americans bombed Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. In 1946 a U.S. Army lieutenant conducted a survey asking Japanese people how they felt about the battering their cities took from American bombs. Were the attacks savage and unnecessary? Almost unanimously they said: “Oh no. Because first we bombed
your
cities that way.”

 

*
Haber's wife certainly thought so. Ashamed of her husband's work, she begged him to stop. He refused. The next day, she committed suicide.

 

*
The number has continued to grow over the years as more research has been conducted. The commonly accepted figure, according to the International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare held in China in 2002, is 580,000.

 

*
The exact same words—by pure coincidence—were used by the highest-ranking member of the Soviet mission. According to Courtney Whitney, Col. Gen. S. A. Golunsky was arrested by the American military police for traveling outside the twenty-five-mile zone. The Russian general was outraged and demanded a written apology. For the supreme commander the issue was very simple: Could any foreigner travel around Russia without correct papers and not be arrested? Of course not. You tell the general, MacArthur instructed his aide, “There will be no apology, oral or written.” When Golunsky got the message, he had only one thing to say: “What a man! . . . A real leader.”

 

*
In an October 1947 memo marked “secret” from SCAP's William Sebald to the State Department's deputy director for Far Eastern affairs (obviously seen by Kennan, the recipient's boss), Sebald wrote:

Dr. Wang stated that the Chinese are most desirous of obtaining a larger share of reparations out of current production. In rebuttal of this statement, General MacArthur drew two parallel horizontal lines, the lower line representing Japan's present 45% production and the upper line a theoretical 100% production. He said the space between the two lines could be reached only at the expense of the United States and that the Chinese must consider us very stupid if they believe that we would fill in the gap only to have production turned over to the Chinese in the form of reparations.

 

*
It was just as well she was not invited to the meeting. Women in those days were not allowed in the Harvard Club (except in a “Women's Dining Room,” with its own separate entry next to the main entrance).

 

*
Given to him no fewer than three times: by the president's directive of September 6, 1945, by the Joint Chiefs' directive of November 3, 1945, and by the FEC's directive of June 19, 1947, all telling him to dissolve the
zaibatsu
(see brief excerpts in the endnotes).

 

*
It is difficult to provide a dollar equivalent because there was severe inflation during the early years of the occupation, plus there was a substantial variation in the cost of dollars used for import as opposed to export, depending on the particular commodity being bought/sold. In August 1945 the estimated average value of the dollar was 13.6 yen; in June 1949, when Joseph Dodge created a fixed rate, he set the dollar at 360 yen.

 

*
The Japanese award for the best pitcher of the year, equivalent to the American Cy Young Award, is called the Sawamura Award.