THE SURRENDER: The Last Beachhead

A brisk south wind was scattering tiny white clouds across the blue sky above Atsugi airfield when the first U.S. troops landed. Tall grass, dancing in the wind, cast sawtooth patterns on the ground.

Witnessing the scene, a Domei reporter named Akimine said it made his eyes smart: “So much emotion packed into a single moment. . . .”

There was emotion, too, but of a different sort, in the hearts of the 11th Airborne Division as they dropped down on Atsugi, of the 4th Marines as they plunged ashore at Yokosuka, heavily laden with battle gear that was to be useless. This was the last beachhead, and they hit it standing up. There was no fight left in the enemy.

G.I.s stared with cold curiosity at the impressive wreckage of the Japanese Imperial Army. The tough brown soldiers, ragged, weary, grim, clung to packed trains and swarmed the roads, following the long way home from war. City dwellers cheered them, but unbombed rustics, who could not understand the surrender, jeered. The main Jap army was unbeaten in the field, but Leyte, Iwo Jima, Saipan, Okinawa had convinced Japan’s rulers that their army could not win a battle.

The General Smiles. General of the Army Douglas Mac Arthur was a different man. As he stepped from his transport plane Bataan his sternly sculptured features relaxed in an easy smile. The austere man who used to forget faces called first names, clasped hands, and complimented the military band. Later he dined with his junior officers; he had not done so since Dec. 7, 1941.

The invasion proceeded with machine-like precision. Transport planes floated down on the airstrips at four-minute intervals. U.S. and British battleships, cruisers and destroyers marched in stately file through the treacherous Uraga Channel into Tokyo Bay. It was almost too smooth. Said a dry Britisher, watching Brigadier General William T. Clement and a few marines raise the U.S. flag over Yokosuka’s terraced naval base: “Now he’ll declare the bazaar open.”

Clean Sheets. Many who had fought the Japs went ashore tense with the fear of treachery or the expectation of sullen resentment. But it was like a veteran’s dream of victory.

U.S. officers at Atsugi were shepherded to a comfortable mess hall and given turtle soup, roast beef and egg sandwiches.* They had expected to sleep on the ground but were shown to comfortable beds with snowy linen sheets. Japanese guided the Americans to MacArthur’s headquarters in the New Grand Hotel on Yokohama’s picturesque waterfront—the one part of the city the bombs had not touched. Just off the lobby, with its pink plush and ornate carving, a bucktoothed, bespectacled Japanese girl helped a U.S. sergeant allot rooms to U.S. brass. The manager was in a managerial frenzy lest the food and service be anything less than perfect. Houseboys brought cold bottles of beer and urged U.S. officers to drink their beer, shower, and not to be late for dinner. A sign on a factory roof, said: “Three cheers for the U.S. Navy and Army.”

Peace, Quiet, Eternity. There was evidence of frightful devastation; at the same time there was an air of peace and quiet and eternity. Brown-skinned swimmers plunged in the jade-and-white waters of the bays, and fishermen gazed calmly at the giant battlewagons. Farmers tilling the checkerboard of fields were more concerned with their growing things than with the myriad planes overhead; they did not look up.

Japanese officers saluted smartly, sometimes tried to shake hands. Most U.S. officers ignored them.

Japanese newspapers displayed pictures and stories of the Americans’ arrival with the same extravagance they once gave Japanese victories.

Joy, Fear, Enmity. Children laughed and waved. Their parents closed their doors or hid in the corrugated iron shacks that sheltered the bombed-out. Nubile Japanese girls scampered for cover as U.S. troops approached. And civilians in the streets of Tokyo—the men wearing random bits of army uniform, the women in baggy dark trousers and white blouses—stared at the invaders with unconcealed hostility.

Those who could and would talk displayed a wide range of reaction. Few could understand why Tokyo had been bombed and could see no point in comparing it with Manila’s destruction.

Some seemed sincerely thankful that the Americans had arrived. Said a merchant prince to two visiting Americans: the Greater East Asia Sphere had long been a mockery. Critical shortages of materials had begun to wreck the empire a year ago. It was all the military’s fault. The public expected Tojo and other war criminals to be tried. When Saipan fell, the people knew the war was lost. Those who had been in the U.S. (including the merchant prince) knew it was hopeless when it started. The merchant poured three drinks and toasted the Americans: “To your safe arrival.” The Mayor of Yokosuka, whom U.S. newsmen described as the spit & image of Tojo, toasted President Truman.

Said Domei of an advance party of Navy flyers: “… [they were] very light-hearted and agreeable; they did not show any attitude, whether in speech or manner, of boasting of their victory. . . . The agreeable attitude shown by these pilots is something of which every Japanese must be ever mindful when coming into contact with the U.S. occupational forces from now on.”

Tea & Flowers. A writer expressed the belief that Americans wanted to understand Japan better. The art of ceremonial tea-making and flower arrangements, he said hopefully, were “in fashion among the society class of America.”

Real humility was not conspicuous. In Tokyo correspondents asked a Harvard-educated Foreign Office spokesman if Japan would ever again attempt world conquest. The spokesman gazed out of his window overlooking the city’s devastation. Then he answered: “We are paying a very great price for our attempt. However, if your treatment is too severe, the Japanese will react.”

A soldier said he did not think Japan had lost face by submitting to the U.S., because it was the strongest among nations. What really hurt was China’s place on the side of the victors. He would like to go on fighting the Chinese.

The Nippon Times editorialized that perhaps this was the beginning of a new period of peaceful enlightenment and democracy. But in the same issue it reported: “Thirty-two members, including one woman, of patriotic nationalistic organizations are so far known to have committed suicide in Tokyo in a true patriotic spirit, eager to apologize to the Throne for their inability to win the war.”

Catastrophe & Sin. Jap propaganda, by stressing the atomic bomb, likened defeat to a natural calamity. Said Premier Prince Higashi-Kuni: “The cause of our defeat was the sudden collapse of our fighting strength.” Japanese seemed eager to accept this explanation. Perhaps they would never realize that, before the atomic bomb was dropped, their navy & merchant marine had been sunk, their air force whipped, their army outclassed.

War guilt they seemed to feel not at all. Some students of Japanese history maintain that in ancient and modern Japanese ethics there is no sense of guilt. Sin and catastrophe are in the same category. The war’s disastrous end was grievous as earthquakes had been grievous. Defeat polluted but did not necessarily shame; it called, perhaps, for “purification,” but not for repentance and atonement.

This state of mind would be one of the most difficult problems facing the victors. Ultimately, the Japanese had to be convinced that aggression was evil.

But for the happy, peaceful moment, the victors were content to survey the inscrutable vanquished and to be glad the Japs had had sense enough to quit. One G.I. looked from a plane at the tumbled hills and mountains of Honshu’s spine and said: “Am I glad I don’t have to fight over this country—just like Okinawa.”

* In prison camps ten miles away U.S. prisoners were still starving.