The Leper Spy (16 page)

There was one more option.

O
n February 23, 1946, a year to the day after the raid to free the starving prisoners at Los Baños, flood lights shone on the thirteen steps leading up to the black gallows not far from the camp. It was 3:00
AM
. The predawn stars looked like little pinpricks of light in the tropical sky.

Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, Tiger of Malaya, climbed the steps without emotion, his hands bound together in front. A wire fence twenty-five feet high surrounded the gallows, and it was covered with camouflage netting. The newspaper reporters and photographers were barred from the area. A heavily armed guard patrolled the perimeter. A Japanese priest accompanied the defeated general, who was dressed in American khaki trousers and shirt and wearing a green fatigue hat. He had been stripped of his medals on orders from MacArthur.

Lt. Charles Rexroad, of Corvallis, Oregon, an ex–football player who stood six foot three and weighed 245 pounds and would tally 130 executions before the war was over, stepped aside and directed the paunchy Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita to his place and slid a Manila hemp rope around his neck. Rexroad, the son of a Methodist minister, would later say he chose the length of the rope based on the scope of the atrocities and that he never lost a wink of sleep about it. In fact, he had been eligible for discharge, but he stayed
in the Philippines for this execution in particular, not for the $200 bonus he was to receive.

If the stories belong to the victors, the Japanese general's end was an integral piece of Douglas MacArthur's narrative. After he liberated Manila at a heavy cost, MacArthur deployed the Eighth Army in great stinging maneuvers that caught the Japanese by surprise throughout the islands, cutting them off from supplies, trapping them, chasing them into the mountains, where the guerrillas ambushed them. Without the permission of his superiors, MacArthur vanquished the enemy in the Philippines with speed, dash, and brilliance. After the fighting on Luzon, he lost just 820 soldiers to the 21,000 Japanese killed in action. “The Japanese during the operations employed twenty-three divisions, all of which were practically annihilated,” he announced in July 1945. “Our forces comprised seventeen divisions. This was one of the rare instances when in a long campaign a ground force superior in numbers was entirely destroyed by a numerically inferior opponent.” With Adolf Hitler's suicide in April and Germany's surrender in May, the Soviets joined the Allies in the fight in the Pacific. American troops who had been slugging it out in Europe were sent to help the general mop up and, if the emperor refused to capitulate, invade the Japanese homeland. Such an invasion seemed imminent by late June when the United States won the Battle of Okinawa, where 110,549 Japanese died. Japan's best warships were at the bottom of the ocean. The United States had air bases on Iwo Jima and Saipan and firebombed city after city. An estimated 267,000 buildings in Tokyo alone burned to the ground. Bomber crews returned with the stench of burning flesh in their nostrils, a smell some of them would remember decades later, on their deathbeds.

On August 6, a B-29 bomber called the
Enola Gay
dropped a nine-thousand-pound atomic bomb called Little Boy on the Japanese manufacturing city of Hiroshima. President Harry Truman, who had assumed office after Roosevelt's death on April 12, 1945, said: “If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain
of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.” On August 8, the Soviets invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria by land. On August 9, another B-29, this one called
Bockscar,
dropped an even larger atomic bomb called Fat Man on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

The combined bombs killed some two hundred thousand Japanese civilians, many of whom believed that the home islands, now burning and blasted to hell, were sacred, that they'd formed from salty drops of water that fell from the halberd that belonged to a god, and that Japan would ultimately win the war.

Finally, on August 15, Emperor Hirohito ordered an end to hostilities. Japan sent sixteen delegates to Manila to negotiate terms of surrender plans. When those were settled on, MacArthur flew to the battered country in his C-54, with B
ATAAN
painted on its nose. His staff was wary of a trap or of an attack from a remaining fanatic band of soldiers who refused to follow their emperor's orders. They remembered Pearl Harbor and Manila. But MacArthur told them to stand down, to disarm, that nothing would impress the conquered like a show of absolute fearlessness. Upon arrival at the New Grand Hotel in Yokohama, MacArthur even refused to let someone else taste his steak for poison.

His second dinner at the hotel was interrupted when it was announced he had a visitor. MacArthur was headed for the lobby when the door swung open. There stood his old friend, Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, whom he had left on Corregidor with the command to never surrender. Wainwright, leaning on a cane, was a shadow of his former self. His eyes were sunken, his hair white, his face like shoe leather. He'd been freed from a Japanese prison camp, where he'd been held captive for three years, three months, and eighteen days. He was fed little and was forced to bow to abusive prison guards. He was allowed no outside news, so he spent long days wondering how the war was going and what the nation
thought about the general who surrendered the Philippines, if they thought about him at all. He wondered what MacArthur felt, too.

Wainwright would be pinned with the Medal of Honor by President Truman and grace the cover of
Time
magazine and receive a hero's welcome in a ticker tape parade through New York City. But in that moment all he could manage in his shame was one word.

“General …” Wainwright said, then burst into tears.

“Why, Jim,” MacArthur said, using Wainwright's private nickname. “Your old corps is yours when you want it.”

Wainwright was further humbled and, to the reporters gathered, he modestly expressed his “heartfelt gratitude” to the American people “for their generous understanding of my dire misfortune when I was forced by circumstances beyond my control to surrender to the Japanese forces at Corregidor.

“The belief that you appreciated the difficulties of my position has sustained and comforted me during the years of my captivity, and I thank you, all of you, for your generosity.”

Two days later, on September 2, a Sunday morning, Wainwright climbed the starboard ladder to the deck of the huge battleship USS
Missouri,
the likes of which he had never before seen. An admiral showed him where to stand for the ceremony, in a place of honor, flanking MacArthur. Overhead flew the American flag that had flown over the Capitol in Washington on December 7, 1941. Wainwright listened as MacArthur addressed the Allied commanders—the Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians, Chinese, Russians, French, Brits, and Dutch—and the Japanese dignitaries and foreign ministers before him. He wore no medals, just five small gold stars on his collar. “We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers—to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored. The issues involving divergent ideals and ideologies have been determined on the battlefields of the world and hence are not for our discussion or debate. Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the people of the earth, in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred. But rather it is for us, both
victors and vanquished, to rise to that higher dignity which alone befits the sacred purposes we are about to serve, committing all our people unreservedly to faithful compliance with the obligation they are here formally to assume,” he said. “It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a world founded upon faith and understanding—a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance, and justice.”

One thunderstruck Japanese diplomat would say the general's words sailed on wings: “For the living heroes and dead martyrs of the war this speech was a wreath of undying flowers.”

MacArthur then invited the Japanese commanders and diplomats to sign the surrender documents, which the army had printed on rare parchment paper found in a basement in devastated Manila.
MacArthur then signed each of the five documents with a different pen, handing the first pen to Wainwright, who saluted before accepting. After the Allied commanders signed, the Japanese disembarked and a great mass of planes, American B-29s, came in from the south, flown by the same boys who had firebombed the Japanese cities, boys who would be home to Oklahoma or Arkansas or Nevada in time for Thanksgiving dinner. They dropped no bombs this time but banked in a sweeping turn and disappeared toward the distant Mount Fuji.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur during formal surrender ceremonies on the USS
Missouri
in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. Behind General MacArthur are Lt. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright and Lt. Gen. A. E. Percival.
National Archives and Records Administration

MacArthur then addressed the American people by radio. The Japanese diplomats in the gun room of the destroyer on its way back to port heard the address as well. MacArthur's wife, Jean, also listened from Manila.

“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. The entire world is quietly at peace. The holy mission has been completed. And in reporting this to you, the people, I speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way. I speak for the unnamed brave millions homeward bound to take up the challenge of that future which they did so much to salvage from the brink of disaster.”

He spoke of the energy of the Japanese and of his desire for the empire, with the right guidance, to expand upward instead of outward. He pointed to the Philippines as an example.

“In the Philippines, America has evolved a model for this new free world of Asia,” he said. “In the Philippines, America has demonstrated that peoples of the East and peoples of the West may walk side by side in mutual respect and with mutual benefit. The history of our sovereignty there has now the full confidence of the East.”

There remained the matter of accepting the surrender of Japanese outliers in the Philippines, and MacArthur put Lt. Gen. Wilhelm Styer, commander of US forces in the western Pacific, in
charge. The next day, Styer and Wainwright flew to Manila. What was left of the Japanese armed forces continued to fight until many of them heard the emperor's surrender by radio and turned themselves in. The largest group of holdouts on Luzon, some forty thousand sick and wounded soldiers, were loosely organized around Kiangan, northeast of Baguio, an area that had come to be known as Yamashita's Pocket. Yamashita was still commanding troops as he awaited word of the official surrender signing in Tokyo. Once that was confirmed, Yamashita, wearing a patched uniform and his ancestor's seven-hundred-year-old sword, turned himself in to an American delegation and was flown to Baguio to meet Styer and Wainwright.

American planes fly in formation during surrender ceremonies aboard the USS
Missouri
near Tokyo, Japan, on September 2, 1945.
National Archives and Records Administration

The tables had turned. Japan's Greater East Asia bubble had burst. “I am without words to tell the thrill of seeing the surrender
aboard the
Missouri,”
Wainwright said, “and I have an equal thrill just now seeing the imperial command bow and bend to the United States. During the first five months of this war, we were handled rather severely and lacked the force to combat these people. The shoe is on the other foot today.”