CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“These Proceedings Are Closed”

Two days after MacArthur returned to Manila from the Balikpapan landings, his headquarters issued one of his patented communiqués—premature in its report of total victory and exaggerated in its characterization of the strategic importance of his operations. “The entire Philippine Islands are now liberated and the Philippine Campaign can be regarded as virtually closed,” it began. Never mind that the “isolated action of a guerrilla nature” of which MacArthur spoke was in fact large-scale resistance still opposing Krueger’s Sixth Army on Luzon and Eichelberger’s Eighth Army throughout the southern islands.

MacArthur characterized the Philippines as a wedge in the Japanese center from which strategic drives would continue both to the north and to the south and compared the archipelago to the British Isles as a gigantic base for future Allied operations. MacArthur indeed had plans for further operations into the Netherlands East Indies, particularly against Java. But by then, the Joint Chiefs had ordered both MacArthur and Nimitz to prepare for the invasion of Kyushu around November 1, and long before Okinawa was secured, late in June, there was no question that this operation—certainly not Java—would be the major focus.¹

Left unreported was a July 1 operations summary from Krueger that his Sixth Army troops had counted 173,000 Japanese dead to that point on Luzon, and the enemy was still fighting in strength. The casualties “may be of interest to you,” Krueger told MacArthur, because they were twenty thousand more than the number of Japanese troops Willoughby estimated to be on Luzon when the first wave of American troops splashed ashore in Lingayen Gulf.2

Despite the increasing sophistication of Ultra intercepts, Willoughby’s interpretations of them remained suspect. As recently as the landings at Tarakan, Willoughby became distraught when an Australian general disagreed with him over the size of the Japanese garrison there. Later hard fighting proved the Australian right in his larger numbers.³

MacArthur supposedly once claimed that there had been “only two outstanding intelligence officers in all of military history and mine is not one of them.”⁴ Willoughby is a prime example that MacArthur was not always well served by his staff, but his loyalty to them, especially if they were part of the Bataan Gang, frequently caused him to overlook their individual weaknesses. Willoughby would remain with MacArthur until Korea.

The track record of MacArthur’s chief intelligence officer did not bode well for the campaign against Kyushu. Throughout the spring, War Department plans for this direct stab at the Japanese homeland had been kept fluid by the continuing debate over blockade versus invasion as the final strategic move of the Pacific war. Although Admirals Leahy and King generally favored a blockade with continued air assault, they acquiesced to Marshall’s arguments that only troops on the ground could subdue fanatical resistance, and, in any event, Kyushu was essential to both tightening a blockade and increasing the bombing campaign against Honshu. But what sort of resistance would they face on the ground?

Throughout the summer, Ultra intercepts showed increasing numbers of Japanese forces on Kyushu, including a massing of the type of kamikaze-style aircraft that had given Nimitz’s fleet so much grief off Okinawa. Nimitz admitted to King that his support for an invasion was wavering and that, given the length and cost of the Okinawa campaign, “it would be unrealistic to expect that such obvious objectives as southern Kyushu and the Tokyo Plain will not be as well defended as Okinawa.”⁵

Not only did Ultra show huge numbers of reinforcements pouring into Kyushu, including the large kamikaze air component, it also revealed the Japanese to be heavily fortifying the three primary beachheads that the Americans had selected for the invasion. Even Willoughby tried to backtrack and raise his estimates of Japanese defenders, but MacArthur would not hear of it. When Marshall questioned MacArthur directly on Ultra revelations, MacArthur’s reply, according to Ultra historian Edward Drea, “typified a classic bullheaded operations officer determined to press boldly ahead regardless of intelligence reports highlighting potential hazards.”

First, MacArthur claimed that the Ultra intelligence was greatly exaggerated, and he discredited the heavy strength reported in southern Kyushu. Second, even if the Japanese were massing in southern Kyushu, MacArthur said that Allied airpower would immobilize ground forces and crush them before the invasion, an assertion that flew in the face of their experience at Leyte and on Luzon, where air operations proved no guarantee of quick victory against large numbers of fortified troops. Finally, MacArthur told Marshall that his G-2—ultimately, Willoughby—had invariably overestimated the enemy in every situation when just the opposite had generally been true.

Drea is pointed in his conclusion: “Flush with victory, convinced of his destiny, and poised to culminate his military career by leading the greatest amphibious operation history ever witnessed, MacArthur reasoned away intelligence that contradicted his plans for bringing down the curtain on World War II.”6

Marshall’s concerns about Kyushu defenses and MacArthur’s haughty assurance not to worry played right into the hands of Admiral King, who had long been planning—the Joint Chiefs’ recent decision notwithstanding—to revisit the blockade-versus-invasion issue before committing his fleet to operations that would likely include another furious kamikaze onslaught. Knowing that Nimitz had similar concerns, King decided to send Marshall’s query and MacArthur’s response to Nimitz for comment and instructed him to copy MacArthur in his reply.

If Nimitz reiterated his growing concerns about the Kyushu operation, as King assumed he would, it would give King the perfect opportunity to revisit the entire invasion plan with the Joint Chiefs. At the same time, of course, such backpedaling would be a major blow to MacArthur’s plans and the army-navy cooperation that both MacArthur and Nimitz had been directed to nurture. Nimitz no doubt understood that King was putting him in a bit of a box, and he decided to take his time responding.7 His delay proved shrewd, as the rush of events in early August of 1945 overshadowed the Kyushu plans and left all parties talking about the impact of dropping atomic bombs as well as the Soviet Union’s long-awaited declaration of war against Japan.

The preliminary to dropping the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima was the Potsdam Declaration. Issued by representatives of the United States, Great Britain, and China meeting in postwar Germany—the Soviet Union was present but technically still neutral vis-à-vis Japan—it called for Japan’s immediate and unconditional surrender to avoid complete destruction. When factions within the Japanese government dallied, some of them blindly hoping the Soviet Union might broker better terms, President Harry Truman ordered an atomic bomb dropped whenever weather permitted after August 3. The Twentieth Air Force carried out this directive on August 6.⁸

Much would be made of MacArthur’s subsequent views on the unconditional surrender requirement of the Potsdam Declaration and the use of the atomic bomb. At the time, however, he was not consulted about the former and largely ignorant of the latter. Unlike the unconditional surrender pronouncement against Germany at the end of the Tehran conference, the Potsdam Declaration was made with some input from the military. Marshall and the Joint Chiefs were proponents, although Marshall did not ask MacArthur’s advice as a field commander. In hindsight, MacArthur would say that he would have insisted that the Japanese be assured of their emperor retaining a central role.⁹

As for the atomic bomb, a War Department representative briefed MacArthur on the bomb’s existence in late July, mostly in the context of making certain that Kenney’s air operations avoided cities designated as likely targets. Dr. Karl T. Compton, president of MIT and a member of the presidential advisory committee on the bomb’s use, visited Manila and briefed MacArthur more fully on its capabilities the day after the Hiroshima attack.

In later years, MacArthur claimed that the use of the bomb had been “completely unnecessary from a military point of view” because Japan was about to surrender, but that differs from his repeated assertions at the time that a ground invasion would be needed to bring about a final capitulation. Some of MacArthur’s subsequent views may have been colored by his not having been consulted about the unconditional surrender clause or told earlier about the bomb. Then, too, the bomb kept him from command of what likely would have surpassed the Normandy invasion as history’s greatest amphibious operation.10

The afternoon before news of the Hiroshima bomb reached Manila, MacArthur held an off-the-record briefing for around two dozen correspondents at his headquarters. As usual with these gatherings, it proved to be an hourlong discourse by MacArthur on a range of subjects. James J. Halsema, then a reporter for the Manila Daily Bulletin, was among the journalists in attendance. Halsema had been the editor of the paper’s Baguio edition before the war and endured three years of captivity in Bilibid prison.

Off the record or not, Halsema kept detailed notes on what he called MacArthur’s “amazing range of subjects.” Among them were the general’s opinions that the war might end sooner than many expected, that the Japanese navy was impotent and their shipping destroyed, and that the Japanese army was still large but it would be impossible to arm the civilian population effectively against an invasion.

There was, however, one old refrain that MacArthur couldn’t resist singing once again—perhaps it had by then simply become a matter of habit. Despite facts proving that there had been a massive inflow of men and equipment into the Southwest Pacific Area and the entire Pacific theater, MacArthur expressed the hope that “the Balikpapan landing would be the last show he had to pull on a shoestring.”

As for Kyushu, he gave no public hint of when the landings might occur, but it was generally assumed that any invasion of Japan’s main islands would not take place until the fall. Nonetheless, MacArthur said he planned to go north shortly. As for the Russians, he welcomed their expected participation in the war and noted that it had been “planned since the days when we were much less sure of the outcome than we are now.” Talking about a major Russian encirclement of Manchuria, the general added, “Every Russian killed was one less American who had to be.”¹¹ Two days later, the Soviet Union indeed declared war on Japan.

While Roosevelt and Churchill had long recognized and valued the Soviet Union’s contribution to the war in Europe, what the Russian bear would do—and when—against its old adversary in the Far East had been a matter of lengthy conjecture. Stalin’s promise at Tehran in late 1943 that Russia would enter the war against Japan after Germany’s defeat was little more than a hint of his intentions. At Yalta in February of 1945, he finally put forth a timetable of two to three months after Germany’s defeat. Germany finally surrendered to Eisenhower on May 7.12

MacArthur, who, it will be remembered, was once briefly considered as a possible ambassador to Russia to get him out of the Pacific command cauldron, was on record multiple times throughout the war as favoring a Russian second front in the Pacific. Once again, however, his postwar hindsight—particularly as the Cold War deepened—would attempt to modify or even refute this position.

It was easy enough to explain his interest in Russian intervention as a potential diversion of Japanese attention from his theater in the dark days of 1942, but by February of 1945, he was on record still pressing this point in meetings with secretary of the navy Forrestal and Brigadier General George A. Lincoln, of Marshall’s staff. The latter’s visit to Manila after Yalta is particularly instructive, because Marshall sent one of his inner circle, as he had done after all previous strategic conferences, to report the decisions related to the Pacific—one more example of the fact that, far from ignoring or isolating MacArthur, Marshall went to great lengths to keep him informed.

MacArthur’s response to the Yalta conversations on this occasion was to tell Lincoln that every effort should be made to get Russia into the war before any invasion of Japan took place. MacArthur pointed out that the Russians wanted a warm-water port, likely Port Arthur. He considered it impracticable to deny it because of their military power, so in return, he thought it “only right they should share the cost in blood in defeating Japan.” Far from believing that Russian intervention was by then “superfluous,” as he later wrote in his memoirs, he continued to espouse support for Russian intervention to the Joint Chiefs as late as June 18 and clearly hoped that Russian operations in Manchuria would divert Japanese attention away from his proposed Kyushu landings.13

In the rush of events during midsummer, the Joint Chiefs, who had also been encouraging Russian involvement, suddenly came to grips with the prospect of a rapid Japanese collapse. If this occurred, Russian troops making huge territorial gains in Manchuria, and even invading Hokkaido, was a possibility. The chiefs had only to look to the territorial race in Germany that spring to gauge its likelihood. Evidence made public after the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union revealed that, noncommittal though Stalin may have appeared to Roosevelt and Churchill, he indeed had ambitions in the Far East in 1945 that extended well beyond Manchuria and Korea to Japan itself.¹⁴

Predicting some of this, the Joint Chiefs sent MacArthur a message while they were still at Potsdam warning him that it might be necessary for him to take prompt action on the Japanese mainland, possibly before a Russian entry into the war. The chiefs also asked War Department staff to provide information on MacArthur’s plans for occupying Japan in the event of a rapid Japanese collapse. Told that MacArthur was prepared to land occupation forces against moderate opposition twelve days after Japan’s surrender, the chiefs advised MacArthur and Nimitz that coordination of their plans in the event of the same “is now a pressing necessity.”¹⁵

When the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8 and unleashed its troops along the Manchurian border, MacArthur’s statement at the time remained unequivocal: “I am delighted at the Russian declaration of war against Japan,” his press release of August 9 proclaimed. “This will make possible a great pincer movement which cannot fail to end in the destruction of the enemy.”¹⁶

But it was rapidly becoming a dicey ballet: the United States wanted the Soviet Union to get involved in order to save American lives and speed the end of the war, but Soviet moves in Europe had already telegraphed that the peace would be adversarial. As the British embassy in Washington reported in its weekly dispatch to London, “It becomes daily more evident that the United States of America sees Soviet Russia as its only rival for world supremacy and at the same time has no desire to become embroiled with her.”¹⁷

On August 10, the day after a second atomic bomb was dropped, this time on Nagasaki, the Japanese government agreed to the Potsdam terms on the condition that the sovereignty of the emperor would be preserved. Acting for the Allies, the United States accepted this accommodation provided it was understood that the authority of the emperor and the Japanese government would be subject to an appointed supreme commander for the Allied powers, who would take whatever steps were necessary to effectuate the unconditional surrender terms.18

There was never much question about who the supreme commander would be. The wheels had been set in motion the previous spring, when MacArthur was appointed commander in chief of US Army forces in the Pacific. Short of someone being dispatched from Washington, which no one seems to have seriously considered, the only other likely candidate was Nimitz. Despite Nimitz’s qualifications and accomplishments, MacArthur had two major considerations in his favor. Not only would the occupation of Japan require ground forces, but MacArthur had also led Allied troops and been designated an Allied commander in chief. This was an easy decision, lacking the angst frequently associated with MacArthur, and President Truman made it on August 12.

Three days later, on what would be designated V-J Day—August 15, 1945—MacArthur received his formal orders as supreme commander for the Allied powers. He alone was to accept Japan’s signed surrender document on behalf of the United States, China, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and “the other United Nations at war with Japan,” thus making it clear to the Russians that their request to preside as coequals was firmly denied.

MacArthur was further to require Imperial General Headquarters to issue such orders as necessary to arrange the surrender of Japanese forces in the field. There was to be no question that the authority of the emperor and Japanese government would be subject to MacArthur’s directives and that he would exercise supreme command over all land, sea, and air forces of the Allied powers engaged in the occupation. By any standard, it was a sweeping delegation. Lest the US Navy feel slighted, the same directive appointed Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz to represent the United States at the surrender ceremony.¹⁹

MacArthur acknowledged his orders promptly, telling Truman, “I am deeply grateful for the confidence you have so generously bestowed upon me… I shall do everything possible to capitalize this situation along the magnificently constructive lines you have conceived for the peace of the world.”20 Having sent Eisenhower the original of Roosevelt’s directive appointing him to command Overlord, Marshall then sent MacArthur Truman’s signed original of the directive designating him supreme commander for the Allied powers.²¹

MacArthur, however, had little time to celebrate. On August 19, a sixteen-man delegation headed by Lieutenant General Torashiro Kawabe, vice chief of the Imperial Japanese Army general staff, flew to Manila on MacArthur’s instructions and delivered extensive data on Japanese army, airfield, and naval facilities as well as POW camps. Giving a hint that the Japanese were not the only ones with an emperor largely unseen behind the palace moat, MacArthur never met directly with this delegation. Instead it was Sutherland, along with Dick Marshall, Willoughby, Chamberlin, and others, who undertook the negotiations about how and when American forces would land in Japan.²²

By their own admission, the Japanese were worried about unrest and disobedience among their troops, especially kamikaze pilots at Atsugi Naval Air Base, near Yokohama, where advance units of the Eleventh Airborne Division were scheduled to land. Sutherland agreed to postpone their landing from August 23 to August 26; the remainder of the division was to land two days later.

Turning to a Washington-drafted proclamation for Emperor Hirohito to read, the Japanese were disturbed to find an informal pronoun used for “I” in the phrase “I, Hirohito, Emperor of Japan,” instead of the formal pronoun. Told this was of critical importance to their countrymen’s acceptance of the surrender and future cooperation, Sutherland took the matter up with MacArthur, who readily agreed to the change, demonstrating the sensitivity to Japanese traditions he would employ during the years of occupation.²³

As busy as the days of August were for MacArthur, there were moments of introspection that ran the gamut of the emotions he routinely held in check. Part of it was a melancholy, not unlike that experienced by many senior officers at the close of World War II, that ensued when he realized he had passed the great watershed of his life.

Two days after the first atomic bomb was dropped, veteran war correspondent Theodore H. White called on MacArthur in Manila. White was hurrying back to his post in China, but he wanted to get MacArthur’s appraisal of what it meant. White reported that MacArthur was “no longer roaring as he used to roar” as he discussed the bomb. “White,” MacArthur asked, “do you know what this means?” It meant, the general said, that “wars were no longer matters of valor or judgment.” As he paced back and forth, MacArthur lamented, “Men like me are obsolete.”24

There were other poignant moments as well. Jonathan Wainwright, who had long thought himself disgraced by the loss of Bataan, was liberated from a POW camp in Manchuria by Russian troops. Marshall cabled MacArthur and suggested that it might be appropriate to have Wainwright present at the surrender ceremony. Public opinion in the United States favored it, Marshall said, and MacArthur, despite his private contempt for Wainwright’s actions in 1942, had little choice but to acquiesce. Marshall went on to arrange the Medal of Honor for Wainwright, which MacArthur’s earlier objections had quashed.²⁵

Overriding everything else, however, was the expectation of the journey to Japan that MacArthur had contemplated for three and a half years. Sutherland’s agreed timetable was pushed back two additional days when a typhoon roared through southern Japan and turned the airfield at Atsugi into a muddy quagmire. On the morning of August 27, ships of Halsey’s Third Fleet began moving into Sagami Bay, south of the airfield, in preparation for entering Tokyo Bay itself. The next day, an advance detachment of 150 engineers and communications technicians landed at Atsugi.²⁶

MacArthur would not be far behind. It was MacArthur’s judgment that if Emperor Hirohito ordered his armed forces and the general population to lay down their arms, they would not only do so, they would also treat the victors with respect and do their best to ensure their safety. Many on MacArthur’s staff were skeptical, but they could not convince him otherwise.²⁷

On August 29, it was finally time for MacArthur to fly north. Dusty Rhoades had picked up a brand-new C-54 some months before in the States and had been keeping it primed and ready for MacArthur’s use. This aircraft also bore the name Bataan. As the flight lifted off from Nichols Field, near Manila, Rhoades permitted one deviation from standard operating procedure. Theretofore he had never allowed MacArthur and Sutherland to fly on the same plane. This time, MacArthur overruled Rhoades and insisted that Sutherland accompany him, evidence that despite the testiness between them during the previous year, they still shared a deep professional bond.

North of Manila, en route to an overnight stop on Okinawa, MacArthur wanted an aerial tour of the Luzon battlefields, where the Japanese had fought to the very last. The next day at 9:00 a.m., Bataan II took off from Okinawa bound for Atsugi Naval Air Base. MacArthur spent most of the flight in the cockpit, especially after the white cone of Mount Fuji came into view. By making a wide turn over Tokyo Bay, Rhoades was able to land exactly on schedule, at 2:00 p.m.28

Throughout the day, wave after wave of C-54s had been landing the bulk of the Eleventh Airborne Division. The division band was on hand to strike up a lively march, but as MacArthur appeared alone at the door of his plane, a cluster of photographers captured one indelible image. His trademark sunglasses adorned his face, and the battered cap that had survived his escape from Corregidor perched atop his head. Corncob pipe clenched in his teeth, MacArthur started down the stairs—clearly in command but not defiant, magisterial but not regal. Eichelberger, commander of Eighth Army, which would garrison postwar Japan, met him at the bottom of the steps. “Bob,” said MacArthur to the man he had once told to take Buna or not come back alive, “this is the payoff.”²⁹

From the airport, the general was driven with only a minimal escort twenty miles into Yokohama to the Hotel New Grand, which served briefly as his quarters. Eichelberger claimed that he “did not draw an easy breath” until MacArthur was safely ensconced there, but there were no incidents.³⁰

MacArthur’s landing within hours of the first troops proved far more dramatic to the Japanese people, as well as to others around the globe, than if he had come ashore behind ten or twenty divisions. His avowed understanding of the Japanese psyche aside, MacArthur might easily have become the target of fanatical Japanese resistance.

According to Willoughby, Winston Churchill later professed, “Of all the amazing deeds of bravery of the war, I regard MacArthur’s personal landing at Atsugi as the greatest of the lot.”31 That may well have been Willoughby’s standard pro-MacArthur hyperbole, but there is no question that the action was risky and that MacArthur had repeatedly shown he did not lack personal courage.

An attribute that Douglas MacArthur had shown on rare occasions was his mastery of understatement. He was about to display this par excellence. Indeed, for all the criticism of MacArthur—deserved and undeserved—his performance while presiding over the Japanese surrender ceremony met with universal acclaim. It may well have been one of the very few moments in his life when he was able to walk the middle ground.

At 7:20 a.m. on Sunday, September 2, after a breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, jam, and coffee, MacArthur and a party that included Doc Egeberg and Dusty Rhoades made the five-minute ride from the Hotel New Grand through the bombed-out center of Yokohama to the customs house pier. There they went aboard the destroyer Buchanan for the six-mile trip out to Halsey’s flagship. Named for the first superintendent of Annapolis, the nimble destroyer was a well-worn veteran of the Pacific, having seen action from the Solomons campaign through the Admiralties to Iwo Jima as well as carrier operations off the Philippines.

In a nod to the US Navy—in addition to Nimitz signing for the United States—secretary of the navy Forrestal had lobbied for the surrender ceremony to take place on the battleship Missouri. MacArthur raised no objections, and the shipboard location proved far more dramatic than a few tables in a hangar at Atsugi or even the old American embassy in Tokyo would have been. What better statement of American might, as well as the Allied power MacArthur had just been given, than an 887-foot, forty-five-thousand-ton battleship riding at anchor in Tokyo Bay?

Over the previous several days, MacArthur had written and rewritten the words he would read on this historic occasion. After the Buchanan came alongside the Missouri, MacArthur strode briskly up the starboard forward gangway, followed by Sutherland, and was greeted on deck with salutes and handshakes, first from Nimitz and then from Halsey. From the halyards flew two flags with five stars each—MacArthur’s insignia on a field of red and Nimitz’s on a field of blue.

Nimitz gestured MacArthur in the direction of the ceremonies but realized that he was on MacArthur’s right. Strict protocol gave MacArthur that spot as the ranking officer. Slipping briefly behind him, and with a gentle pat on MacArthur’s left side, Nimitz steered the general to the right as they walked along the deck. Halsey followed, and they went to his cabin to await the arrival of the Japanese delegation.32

A launch brought Minister of Foreign Affairs Mamoru Shigemitsu and chief of the Imperial Japanese Army general staff Yoshijiro Umezu, along with their attendants, alongside the Missouri a few minutes before 9:00 a.m. Having lost a leg to an assassin’s bomb in Shanghai years before, Shigemitsu wore an artificial limb. He moved with some difficulty with a cane onto the deck and up the ladder to the surrender site, below the number 2 gun turret. Told where to stand, the Japanese delegation waited before the assembled throng of Allied officers for around four minutes, until MacArthur, Nimitz, and Halsey emerged on deck and MacArthur moved purposefully to the microphone, clutching the pages of his well-honed remarks in his left hand.

“We are gathered here,” he slowly began, “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.… As supreme commander for the Allied powers, I announce it my firm purpose in the tradition of the countries I represent to proceed in the discharge of my responsibilities with justice and tolerance while taking all necessary dispositions to ensure that the terms of surrender are fully, promptly, and faithfully complied with.

“I now invite the representatives of the emperor of Japan and the Japanese government and the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters to sign the instrument of surrender at the places indicated.”³³

Shigemitsu came forward first, moving slowly on his prosthesis, and with some difficulty sat down on a chair at the table before MacArthur upon which two copies of the surrender instrument were spread—the Japanese copy, bound in black, and the Allied copy, bound in green. Shigemitsu removed his silk hat and white gloves and looked at the papers in front of him with a puzzled look of uncertainty. According to Kenney’s account, there was dead silence until MacArthur’s voice snapped through the air “like a pistol shot.”

“Sutherland,” he barked. “Show him where to sign.”

Sutherland stepped forward and pointed to the correct line. It was near the top of the second page of the document, and Shigemitsu stood to reach forward and sign both copies. He then returned to his place as General Umezu stepped forward. Umezu deliberately reached into his uniform pocket and removed his eyeglasses from their case. He produced his own pen and, without sitting down, signed with barely a glance at MacArthur.34

Then it was MacArthur’s turn. Saying that he would sign for the Allied powers, he beckoned Jonathan Wainwright and British lieutenant general Arthur Percival, who surrendered Singapore and had also been a POW, to stand behind him. MacArthur sat down at a chair on the opposite side of the table from where the Japanese had signed and produced a number of pens. The exact number and to whom MacArthur gave them would vary with the telling, although most accounts agree that he gave the first two to Wainwright and Percival.

Next came Chester Nimitz, signing for the United States, while Rear Admiral Forrest Sherman, Nimitz’s chief of staff, looked over his left shoulder. Halsey joined this ensemble, and MacArthur put his left arm around Halsey’s shoulders, the two old warhorses whispering a few words. Then MacArthur called forward the representatives of the other Allied powers to sign in their turn.

As the final Allied representative, Air Vice Marshal Leonard Isitt, of New Zealand, wrote his signatures, a dull roar could be heard in the distance. It grew louder and louder and came closer and closer. In uncanny choreography that MacArthur himself could not have staged better, the overcast of that morning parted to reveal upwards of 450 American planes flying in precise formation through the skies overhead. “None of us knew then,” correspondent Theodore H. White later wrote in his memoirs, “that this was the last war America would cleanly, conclusively win. We thought it was the last war ever.”³⁵

On this climactic day, the dual drives across the Pacific, a strategy that had caused MacArthur so much angst, now appeared to have served the purpose of keeping the Japanese war machine off balance. By the time the titanic sea battles long planned by both sides occurred—in limited measure in the Philippine Sea off the Marianas and in full force aimed against MacArthur at Leyte—the bulk of Japan’s airpower had been decimated and its army and navy overwhelmed on both the Southwest Pacific and Central Pacific fronts.

Perhaps most remarkable was the speed with which fortunes had changed as a result of the tremendous outpouring of America’s industrial infrastructure and the sacrifices of its men and women at home and abroad. In less than four years, from utter despair on December 7, 1941, the United States had crafted the most powerful array of army, navy, and air forces that the world had ever seen—or would see again. That speed may not have been evident to a soldier slogging through the mud of the Kokoda Trail, an airman flying the lonely skies, or a sailor standing another watch. Perhaps it was never evident even to MacArthur. But on September 2, 1945, no one could deny the result.

Douglas MacArthur looked once more to the papers he held in his hand and read the final words he had written. “Let us pray,” he earnestly said, “that peace be now restored to the world and that God will preserve it always. These proceedings are closed.”36

It may well have been his finest hour.