Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [367]
Mustering the great crowd of dignitaries and onlookers next morning, Sunday, 2 September 1945, proved a challenge. There were 225 correspondents and seventy-five photographers, two of these Japanese, together with representatives of every Allied power. Captain Murray took pains to ensure that the respective flag hoists of MacArthur and Nimitz were exactly level. Two Marines hustled an errant Russian photographer into his proper place, while the Americans scrutinised the Japanese cameramen nervously. Soon after 0800, destroyers delivered MacArthur and Nimitz to the ship.
In Tokyo, there was bitter dispute about who should sign the detested peace documents on behalf of the government. “The feeling of Japan’s leaders965, now that the war was ended so suddenly, was characteristic,” wrote Mamoru Shigemitsu. “They abhorred, as an unclean thing, the act of shouldering responsibility for the deed of surrender, and they did their best to avoid it.” He himself was finally appointed, as minister plenipotentiary. At dawn Shigemitsu and a small group, most prominent among whom was Umezu, the army chief, assembled at the prime minister’s official residence. They bowed formally towards the Imperial Palace, then drove through miles of empty streets and bombed-out desolation to Yokohama. There, an American destroyer awaited them for the hour-long passage to Halsey’s flagship.
The Japanese party came alongside Missouri at 0855. Silence fell over the throng as the defeated enemy’s representatives, in formal dress and top hats, mounted the gangway and approached the serried ranks of Allied brass. Shigemitsu, who had lost a leg to an unsuccessful assassin’s bomb a few years earlier, made every step in visible pain, embarrassing the more sensitive Americans. When the Japanese were in their places, MacArthur, Nimitz and Halsey—the last scowling, as usual—emerged from a hatchway and strode to the mess table, covered with a green cloth. MacArthur delivered a short speech, which even his sternest critics have been unable to fault: “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,” he said. “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.”
His hands trembled as he read. Even MacArthur seemed a little overwhelmed by the magnitude of the occasion. The Japanese were deeply impressed by the generosity of the sentiments expressed by the supreme commander. For the first time, they felt a gleam of hope for the future. Then they all signed. At 9:25, the silence was broken by a distant drone, then a great roar overhead, as four hundred B-29s and 1,500 carrier planes staged the greatest fly-past in history. The Japanese bowed, retreated, and descended the gangway. MacArthur walked to a microphone, and delivered another slow, majestic speech. “Today the guns are silent,” he began. “A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won.” After rehearsing memories of the long journey from Bataan to Tokyo Bay, he concluded with an appeal entirely worthy of the moment, for mankind to pursue a new spirit of peace: “These proceedings are now closed,” he said. Nothing so became MacArthur’s tenure of combat command as the manner in which he ended it. The general departed ashore, to begin at the age of sixty-five the most impressive phase of his life, as architect of Japan’s resurrection