An Inoffensive Rearmament (14 page)

A few days earlier, I had seen this man give a most revolting exhibition of the “conqueror concept.” I was in an automobile following his sedan through a “downtown” street of a large city packed with Japanese vehicles, handcarts, streetcars, and pedestrians. I watched in horror as his car plowed through the mass of humanity, equipment, and animals. Then the inevitable happened: the sedan rammed into the rear of a stalled Japanese streetcar. I stopped my automobile as the general jumped out, followed by two aides. His face was livid red; he rushed forward to the front of the streetcar. As Japanese scattered in all directions, the American general caught the diminutive Japanese streetcar motorman by the neck and shoulders and began to shake him as a terrier might shake a small animal. Then, with a flood of obscenity, he threw the little fellow to the street. This was American omnipotence at its naked worst, but there were many smaller barons in the occupation forces who were convinced that all we had to do was command or lash out and 90 million Japanese would jump.

The Japanese militarists, who considered the Korean War as a grand opportunity for their own ambitions, similarly found Yoshida's views inadequate. Although they were unable to come out publicly because they had been purged, they nevertheless conducted an aggressive underground campaign trying to stir those in government to launch an all-out rearmament. One of their most potent arguments was raising the specter of communist takeover. With the Americans committed to leave Japan for Korea, the militarists and their allies cried for immediate rearmament of Japan with troops who had not so long ago served in the Imperial forces.

Prime Minister Yoshida, however, had a genuine horror of the military. During the war, he had been arrested and kept under close surveillance by the
militarists and their thought police, and he had not forgotten the experience. He was not eager to take them into partnership now that he was head of the government.

The Korean War might have been sent “by the grace of heaven” for Japan, but Yoshida knew he had to move slowly, carefully, and intelligently. When he received General MacArthur's letter directing the initial rearmament of the nation, he made his decision. No matter how much pressure our commanders or diplomats tried to exert on him, Yoshida never wavered from his decision. He neither expanded the NPR nor accepted a single weapon for the force until he was satisfied that it was politically and diplomatically safe for Japan to take the next step forward on a gradual, quiet, unruffled, and deliberate march back to her appointed place in the sun. It is not without reason that his political colleagues had named him “One Man” Yoshida, as he called the shots and made his own decisions.

Yoshida's views together with the Basic Plan became the guiding policy for our Advisory Group in rearming Japan.

CHAPTER SIX

STRUGGLE FOR CONTROL

The decision to exclude former military officers from the NPR was not an easy one to make. The new forces needed men with military experience, and there were thousands of former officers of the Imperial Army and Navy who were eager to serve in the new organization. Many Americans and Japanese thought that under the conditions of national emergency, it was stupid not to use them. But the world had not yet recovered from the terror of Nazi and Japanese militarism, and only a few of the most rabid American militarists dared to embrace the recently disgraced military men of Japan.

One of the first acts of the occupation forces in Japan was to demobilize the military forces of that nation. Having crushed and disbanded the Japanese military, SCAP then directed that no career military officer would be permitted in any position in the public life of the nation. This action was taken in accordance with the terms of surrender for Japan agreed upon at Potsdam and announced by the heads of the governments of the United States, Great Britain, and China. In part, these terms demanded that “there must be eliminated for all time the authority and the influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest, for we insist that a new order of peace, security and justice will be impossible until irresponsible militarism is driven from the world.”

Our government firmly supported this worldview, and in August 1945 in the Initial Postsurrender Policy for Japan, General MacArthur was instructed as follows:

High officials of the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters and General Staff, other high military and naval officials of the Japanese Government, leaders of ultranationalist and militarist organizations and other important exponents of militarism and aggression will be taken into custody and held for future disposition. . . . Former career military and naval officers, both commissioned and non-commissioned, and all other exponents of militarism and ultranationalism shall be excluded from supervisory and teaching positions.

Though Potsdam inspired the purge, the policy was a revolutionary blessing to the Japanese people. Without the purge, there could have been no reforms. It was the purge that enabled the people of Japan to get rid of the entrenched leadership that had carried the nation into war and destruction. It was the purge that permitted the country to take its first steps on the road to democracy. Unshackled from the stifling control of the parochial militarists, Japan responded enthusiastically to the social, political, economic, and governmental changes that the American occupation introduced. Swept up in this revolutionary spirit, there were few in Japan pressing for the return of the leaders of the old order. Neither the people nor the government wanted the military back. Prime Minister Yoshida and his cabinet were, of course, fully aware of the desirability of using experienced former officers in the NPR, but they were not prepared to precipitate a public debate on the issue.

Since the prime concern of GHQ was to organize and deploy a Japanese force as soon as practical to fill the military void created by the departure of American divisions for Korea, those in the Dai Ichi Building were not eager to get into a hassle with the Joint Chiefs or the State Department about changing the purge directives. General MacArthur and his chiefs accordingly accepted the purge policy as an inconvenience, but not a block to building a Japanese force. It was generally agreed that by using Americans in top leadership positions, a satisfactory initial organization could be established. With one notable exception, General MacArthur's staff recognized the advisability of putting off to the future inclusion of former military leaders in the National Police Reserve.

The uncompromising exception was the irrepressible Major General Willoughby, MacArthur's intelligence chief. Completely out of sympathy with announced policy, Willoughby was determined from the beginning to bring former
Imperial career officers into the NPR—purge or no purge. Neither opposition from the staff nor hints from General MacArthur himself seemed to deter Willoughby. Initially the elements of his G-2 Section worked in the open, trying to convince everyone concerned that the new force could not be organized without the purged Imperial officers. When these efforts failed, pressure operations went underground. As the resistance continued, I was amazed to find to what extremes a group of influential, determined, thoroughly dedicated staff officers in an American military headquarters were capable of going to circumvent their government's directives and even international agreements. Prewar Japan was not the only example of self-righteous military officers demonstrating that they knew better than anyone what was good for their country.

It cannot be denied that from a military point of view, General Willoughby's position was unassailable. It was logical. An effective military force, he contended, could not be organized, trained, deployed, and commanded by civilians. A military establishment required professionals, people with military training, and experienced career officers.

General Willoughby argued that since the purge eliminated practically all former officers of the Imperial services, except a few lieutenants and captains, the purge had to go. If we limited the leadership of the NPR to these inexperienced and untried junior officers and inducted civilians, we could hope for nothing better for months to come than a conglomerate of ineffective small units. In the face of the deteriorating situation in Korea and the need for an immediate force able to defend Japan, he considered the decision to continue the purge a fatal mistake. In his opinion, the situation called for drastic action. There was no time to wait for a gradual buildup. The situation demanded the recall to the service of Japan the best-qualified military leaders in the nation. There were thousands of them, courageous, dedicated men eager and ready to serve in the new force. General Willoughby knew exactly where to find them because he had carefully planned and prepared for such an eventuality as the one that now faced the Far East Command in Japan.

There are those in this country today who look upon General Willoughby as a rightist and extremist. General MacArthur is quoted as having called him “my lovable fascist,” and indeed after his retirement from the army, General Willoughby became the adviser to Franco of Spain. My generation of army officers, however, knew General Willoughby best as an instructor of military history at the infantry
school. We enjoyed his flamboyant, exciting personality. His conferences were not only interesting, but they were packed with original thinking and sparked with challenging analyses. He was a realist in those days at Fort Benning. Later, after ten years in service on the staff of the Great Man, he may have imbibed too heavily of the heady wine of infallibility that flowed so freely in the General Headquarters of SCAP. But he was a top soldier and a meticulous planner. One could expect him to be prepared for history as it unfolded in Japan. When the war in the Pacific came to an end, G-2 GHQ SCAP had a major responsibility in connection with the disarmament and demobilization of the Japanese war machine. General Willoughby, however, had fought the Imperial forces too many years not to appreciate the tremendous military asset that the demobilized officers represented. He was too alert an intelligence officer to permit this asset to slip through his fingers.

Under the guise of surveillance, he conceived and organized the Japanese Demobilization Bureau (Nihon Fukuinkyoku). Ostensibly the purpose of the bureau was to assist the Far East Command to demobilize the Japanese military establishment and to maintain records of all former Imperial officers. But long after the Japanese had been demobilized, General Willoughby continued to operate his Demobilization Bureau. Six years after the surrender, the bureau had become his personal agency for the eventual reconstruction of the Japanese military establishment.

During the intervening years, Willoughby had gathered together in the Demobilization Bureau some of the most capable generals, admirals, and colonels who remained in Japan after those charged with war crimes had been tried and executed. In addition to maintaining records of those demobilized, the bureau made these former Imperial officers an adjunct of General Willoughby's G-2 Section. Under the guise of performing surveillance of Japanese communists, they attended political and labor meetings, labeling those they distrusted or considered undesirable as “inimical” to the interests of the occupation. Backed by General Willoughby, the reports of the Demobilization Bureau officers were read by the highest American echelons. The militarists had been purged, but as General Willoughby's special agents, the Demobilization Bureau exercised an important influence on the thinking of the occupation forces.

As an agency of records, the bureau had complete information on some 70,000 career officers who had been serving in the Imperial forces at the time of
surrender. The officers of the bureau became the national representatives of those on the purge list. They maintained close liaison with all these officers throughout the land and could reach with equal facility the lowest-ranking demobilized lieutenant or the highest-ranking general or admiral. The officers of the bureau lived in the hope that someday the United States, faced with an emergency like Korea, would be forced to turn to the military brotherhood of Japan for help. On July 8, 1950, when General MacArthur dispatched his historic letter to the prime minister directing the establishment of a four-division force of 75,000 troops, the Demobilization Bureau knew that its day had arrived.