". . . the glories of peace": Richard Tregaskis in Japan

The Douglas C-54 Skymaster transport plane emblazoned with a white star along its sliver fuselage and “Bataan” printed on its nose glided in for a landing at Atsugi Airfield near Yokohama, Japan, on the afternoon of August 30, 1945. With his trademark corncob pipe clenched between his teeth and clad in aviator sunglasses, General Douglas MacArthur climbed down a ramp wheeled up to the plane.

As MacArthur ambled down the steps, the general was serenaded by a band and cheers from paratroopers from the Eleventh Airborne Division, the soldiers who had secured the airfield formerly held by Japanese kamikaze pilots determined to give their lives for their emperor. President Harry Truman had recently appointed MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, giving him the job of overseeing the occupation of the conquered country and directing him to “exercise your authority as you deem proper to carry out your mission.”

Shaking hands with General Robert Eichelberger, head of the Eighth Army, MacArthur, as newspapermen and photographers (some American and many Japanese) swarmed around him, commented: “Well, Bob, it’s been a long road from Melbourne to Tokyo, but as they say in the movies, this is the payoff.” MacArthur also took time to compliment the band’s performance, telling its leader that it had been “about the sweetest music I’ve ever heard.”

As MacArthur and his party, all unarmed at the general’s orders, pushed on from the airfield to Yokohama in a motorcade along a road lined with thousands of Japanese soldiers providing security, more transport planes landed at Atsugi. One passenger, Richard Tregaskis, who had followed members of the Military Government Section from Manila in the Philippines to a muddy base in Okinawa and now on to Japan itself on behalf of the Saturday Evening Post, had trouble believing what was happening. “The nonchalance of this peaceful invasion seemed astounding,” Tregaskis wrote. “I’d been flying with the B-29’s on bombing runs, and on Admiral [William “Bull”] Halsey’s torpedo planes, too recently to realize that the war was over, that all this could happen here.”

Although one of the passengers on Tregaskis's plane jokingly objected that he wanted to return to the United States, most were absorbed in sightseeing, sitting in “awed silence, now, straining to see everything,” Tregaskis reported. As someone pointed out something on the ground to a man sitting next to him, others were quick to try to rush to see what it was. Tregaskis compared it to a “mass nerve response like the craning of necks at a football game or automobile race, when something exciting is happening.”

Only two weeks ago, the countryside would have been “spitting fire” at any American planes overhead, but today Tregaskis’s plane landed without incident alongside aircraft bearing the Rising Sun emblem. Setting foot on the concrete taxiway with his tired companions, Tregaskis recalled something an enlisted man with the Military Government Section, Corporal Vincent A. Livelli, a typist from Brooklyn, New York, had said to him in Manila: “Military government follows the glories of victory with the glories of peace.”
The speed and uncertainty of the end of the war in the Pacific had dampened any riotous celebrations in the Philippines. Tregaskis arrived at MacArthur’s headquarters in Manila shortly after the Japanese news agency, Dōmei, had released a statement on August 10 from the Japanese Foreign Ministry announcing the country’s capitulation. 

What followed, noted Tregaskis, was a period of hopeful waiting that soldiers called “the big sweat,” which seemed to drag on for years. “Nobody was sure just when—or if—he should begin celebrating,” he remembered. “It was like the first day of the double-headed V-E Day in New York; unsteady, uneasy, with people milling about and not knowing just what to do, not being sure, half waiting for the official handout on peace, half wanting to celebrate now.” Peace had caught everyone off guard, just as had the start of the war for the Americans with Japan’s surprise attack at Pearl Harbor nearly four years before.

Although the moment did not seem climatic or clear-cut, it did provide inspiration for Lieutenant Colonel Carl Erickson, the acting head of the Military Government Section (shortened to Milgov in Tregaskis’s Post articles) at MacArthur’s headquarters. Erickson, the executive officer for Brigadier General William E. Crist, who was hurrying back to the Pacific from a visit to Europe to review the occupation there, controlled a tiny staff—two other officers and five enlisted men, all of whom had been snatched away from the Philippines Civil Affairs Unit and assigned to the new section. “If Military Government had to be flown into Japan the next day, this tiny detachment, with whatever other officers could be gathered, borrowed or stolen from other outfits, would have to take over the entire job of administering the central government of Japan,” Tregaskis reported.

With the “air thick with plans” for just how to rule over occupied Japan, Tregaskis secured Erickson’s permission to spend the next few weeks tracking the detachment’s unsteady progress from Manila to Tokyo. Uncertainty and improvisation became key parts of the unit’s existence as it waited for reinforcements; Erickson had been promised, Tregaskis wrote, that 230 men with specialized training were on their way from the United States, dispatched with “No. 1 air priority.”

In the meantime, those assigned to the section displayed remarkable skills at scrounging for needed supplies and office space for the new men. Livelli, who had told the correspondent that he had “never felt closer to history,” found a Japanese phrase book produced for Filipinos during Japan’s occupation of that country by one of the invaders’ propaganda agencies. The only linguist during the detachment’s early days, Livelli, who spoke French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, had, in just a few days spent reviewing the phrase book, had mastered some elementary Japanese language characters, including those that indicated “keep off,” Tregaskis reported.

Others on the staff, however, remained more interested in returning home than in participating in the grand adventure awaiting them in Japan. Like many who were still serving in the military, they anxiously tried to figure out where they stood in the “point system” instituted by the U.S. War Department to determine the order of demobilization. The higher the points they had amassed—for such items as time served, where they had served, decorations earned, and number of dependents—the sooner they could expect to be discharged to see their families again.  

Day by day, Tregaskis observed the Military Government Section grow with “the rapidity of a jungle plant in the monsoon season,” taking up space in new offices in another wing of the building. Crist joined his new command, full of lessons he had learned from his European sojourn and determined to avoid the pitfalls he had observed. “It’s inexcusable to make the same mistakes again,” he told Tregaskis, especially since he and his men were on a twenty-four-hour notice for travel to Japan or other occupied zones, including Korea.

The wallboard partitions that marked the boundaries of the detachment’s office in Manila’s city hall expanded as officers, most fresh from Civil Affairs Training schools in the United States, and rookie enlisted personnel joined the staff. It made for a colorful sight, said the reporter, who saw in the building a “motley ensemble of Navy and Army garb, a mixture of colors and patterns which indicated that the officers who would be supervising the government of Japan had been hastily gathered from many sources to be flung into the emergency situation.”

Tregaskis noticed a trend toward mollifying harsh American attitudes about the Japanese occupation. Instead of a strict military government along the lines of the one established in Germany, as had originally been projected, he saw a shift toward “indirect control,” using the existing Japanese government bureaucracy to run the country, overseen, of course, by MacArthur as supreme commander. Crist gave similar welcoming remarks to all new members of his detachment, letting them know that their initial function would be advisory. “We want to avoid disrupting Japan too much,” the general warned his troops. “Above all we must carry out orders. The commander is given tools. He is responsible for the results. We don’t tell him how to use his tools. That’s up to him. It’s up to the commander to use you, or you, or you, or use me, as he sees fit.”

The “tools” that joined Crist’s command were usually older than ordinary line officers, Tregaskis noted, and their “faces carried interesting marks of character, of developed individuality.” They were men of so many specialties that Erickson, who had been told he would be remaining in Manila and not joining the section in Japan, referred to them humorously as “entomologists and anthropologists.” Their specialties included public safety, finance, banking, public health, public safety, public works, industry, and law.

Those who had to stay in the Philippines were jealous of those selected for service in Japan, remembered Tregaskis, who also would be traveling to the defeated foe’s homeland. “We were envied not only for the chance to see the country with the first occupying forces; but also because the military government office in the City Hall was becoming almost mammoth; and like any expanding organization,” he said, “it was obscuring individuals in its expanding folds.” One of the captains left behind lamented to the correspondent: “With colonels all around, what can a mere captain do?”

Upon his appointment as supreme commander, MacArthur had been determined to formulate his own policies and implement them through Emperor Hirohito and the imperial government, running a conciliatory occupation. Unlike Germany, which had been divided into zones for the different Allied Powers (United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union), the United States, despite Russia’s late entry into the fight, controlled Japan except for token British and Australian troops stationed in Hiroshima. There was an Allied Council for Japan, which consisted of the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and the United Kingdom, meant to advise MacArthur, but the general ignored it, noting that as supreme commander he was the “sole executive authority for the Allied Powers in Japan.”

The general intended to use his unchallenged power to reform the country, to bring it “abreast of modern progressive thought and action” by eliminating its military power, punishing its war criminals, building a proper structure of representative government, modernizing its constitution, giving Japanese women the right to vote, releasing political prisoners, establishing a free press and labor movement, separating church from state, and liberalizing its education system. “It was true that we intended to destroy Japan as a militarist power. It was true that we intended to impose penalties for past wrongs,” MacArthur recalled. “But we also felt that we could best accomplish our purpose by building a new kind of Japan, one that would give the Japanese people freedom and justice, and some kind of security.”

The principles MacArthur planned to follow during the occupation were the same ones, he added, “which our soldiers had fought for on the battlefield.” MacArthur strove to turn Japan into “the world’s greatest laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of a people from totalitarian military rule and for the liberalization of government from within.”

The Military Government Section’s departure from Manila was “a masterpiece of hurry-up-and-wait,” according to Tregaskis, with the U.S. Army playing its old game of ordering someone to be at a rendezvous hours early “so as to allow plenty of time to get there yourself.” The trip involved plenty of discomfort and misery, but the members of the Military Government Section he accompanied endured the hardships with good cheer. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Livelli said as the group waited and waited for the flight to take off from Nichols Field in Manila. A dancer in civilian life, Livelli surprised Tregaskis by sharing that he would be filling his time reading James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, as he was interested in the book “from a philological point of view.”

Another of his companions related to Tregaskis that when he had first joined the army he used to complain quite a bit about its inefficiency. After being in the military for a time, however, he “decided they got things done somehow, so I decided they must be right. Now, I just take it.” Lieutenant Melville Homfeld was probably the most anxious among the group’s members to reach their destination, the port city of Yokohama, located south of Tokyo. When Homfeld entered the army, his wife had also volunteered to serve, joining the Red Cross. She had been assigned to the hospital ship USS Benevolence, which was supposedly anchored in Yokohama Harbor. “Homfeld was very vehement about wanting to see her again,” Tregaskis reported. “In fact, when he talked about the possibility of finding her in Yokohama Harbor, he let out something like a cowboy whoop.”

After a miserable two days at a mosquito-plagued tent camp on Okinawa, Tregaskis set off for the last leg of his trip on a plush C-54E transport plane, equipped with comfortable reclining seats and an electric plate on which the passengers could brew cups of hot coffee. “All around us, on our flanks and ahead, silver specks of other C-54’s, inward bound for Japan, dotted the sky,” Tregaskis wrote. The passengers sat in “awed silence, straining to see everything” as the plane made its descent into Atsugi airfield.

After parking at the end of a long line of C-54s, Tregaskis and his companions climbed down to the tarmac and were met by an American paratrooper in a jeep, who radioed to seek transportation for their party. Unfortunately, the truck that arrived only took them as far as a barnlike wooden hangar located a few yards away to play the army waiting game again. “It was fitting, after all, that we should end our journey to Japan as we had begun it—waiting,” Tregaskis said.

For the next two weeks, the members of MacArthur’s Military Government Section moved slowly, establishing their offices in Yokohama’s customhouse. Tregaskis helped to make signs for the various departments—General Aid, Secretary of Labor, Medical, Finance, Resources, and Public Safety, among others. The correspondent also joined Major Cecil Tilton, Crist’s assistant, and Charles Thomas, a civilian financial adviser, on a trip to the city’s main shopping district to purchase guidebooks and Japanese-English dictionaries. “We found no stores, only piles of rusty iron wreckage, many shacks made out of salvage, and one or two locked and bolted concrete buildings,” said Tregaskis.

Stopping for water for their dilapidated car at a Japanese garage, Tilton asked the proprietor where he could buy books, but discovered there were no bookstores in the city; the nearest ones were in Tokyo. Homfeld had better luck, making it to Yokohama Harbor, boarding the ship on which his wife served, and having a joyous reunion.

Unfortunately, the days soon fell into a deadly dull routine of paperwork and more paperwork. While exciting events were happening elsewhere—the formal Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, for example—military government soldiers “worked long hours in the stuffy confines of their Yokohama customhouse office, from eight-thirty a.m. until eleven o’clock at night,” Tregaskis recalled. “And because the high policy was to be cautious and to center responsibility only at the very top, most of the recommendations, instructions and plans prepared by Milgov had to be rewritten, redone.”

Orders for running the country, Tregaskis noted, came from the supreme commander, MacArthur, directly to the emperor or his representatives, then through the Japanese government’s or civil service’s usual channels. “Our Milgov people were only to advise, check up and make reports,” he wrote.

The military government staff did jump in to assist Lieutenant General John R. Hodge’s Twenty-Fourth Corps, which had been ordered to occupy the southern portion of the Korean peninsula, annexed by Japan in 1910. The occupiers were now gone, and, because there were not enough trained men to take over, and there existed infighting among Korean nationalists seeking power, “real Military Government by outsiders—Americans—would have to be provided,” Tregaskis wrote. Crist’s section in Japan had to produce proclamations for Korea that then needed to be translated into Korean. That proved to be a problem, the correspondent noted, as the unit possessed a Japanese interpreter section, but it had no Korean translators. “However, men who could write Korean were discovered in the Psychological Warfare branch, and the job was done,” Tregaskis wrote.

Things did not improve for the Military Government Section when it moved its operation from Yokohama to Tokyo along with MacArthur’s headquarters, which established itself in a six-story insurance building that became known as the Dai Ichi (Number One) building. The military government staff rode on the “vertebra shattering road between Yokohama and Tokyo” to its new offices in a grimy building that was part of the Japanese Forestry Department.

Instead of preparing to help govern the country, however, the officers and enlisted men Tregaskis had come to know were blindsided by a decision from MacArthur’s headquarters (Order 170) creating the Economic and Scientific Section. This new department took over “not only some of the functions but even some of the personnel of the Military Government Section,” he reported. “It seemed evident to many of the Milgov people that this would be only the first of a series of slices into the physical structure of its organization.”

One officer, whose name Tregaskis kept secret for fear his superiors might punish him for his honesty, said his unit had become “a hollow shell” and complained that those who had been trained for their jobs at a cost of thousands of dollars were now in limbo; it seemed as though the Military Government Section would be “liquidated,” with the supreme commander exercising his authority through the Japanese government. MacArthur’s statement that he expected to maintain only a skeleton military force, approximately 200,000 troops, only confirmed Tregaskis’s belief that the occupation was “going to proceed on a cut-rate—for the Americans basis; that the policy of playing with the soft pedal was going to be continued indefinitely.”

Underlying Tregaskis’s reporting on the situation was his own frustration at losing his ongoing access to a story he had been working on for the past few months, and in the process becoming close to several members of a unit that seemed to be vanishing before his eyes. Also, there still existed bitter feelings among some Americans about the war and how severely Japan should be punished for what many saw as reprehensible conduct.

In a Gallup poll taken during the later stage of the war, only 8 percent of Americans had favored rehabilitating and reeducating Japan (13 percent had agreed with the option “Kill all the Japanese people”). Tregaskis reflected some of that animosity against the enemy in his articles for the Post. Writing about the move from Yokohama to Tokyo, the reporter noted that enlisted men and junior officers from military government “had been assigned to dirty quarters in business buildings, with picayune sanitary facilities.” This had caused “understandable growling,” with the Americans wondering: “Who won the war, after all? Why aren’t we in the best buildings in Tokyo?” Also, racial prejudice still marred relations between occupiers and the occupied. 
 
To gain some insight into what the future might bring for military government, Tregaskis arranged interviews with two of MacArthur’s top advisers—Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, the general’s military secretary and head of the general headquarters’ Psychological Warfare Section, and General Richard K. Sutherland, MacArthur’s chief of staff. Fellers, whose department’s name had been changed, “in line with the prevailing trend toward euphemism,” Tregaskis noted, to Information Dissemination Section, said to the reporter that the Japanese government had been “100 per cent not only co-operative but subservient.”

Tregaskis reminded Fellers that he had heard some people in the United States had been critical of what they viewed as “too much softness” when it came to handling Japan. But Fellers warned that if the Americans were too firm, the Japanese would view it as betraying agreements made before their unconditional surrender, including promises that the existing state structure would be maintained. There were also several liberal reformers in Japan who might be able to steer the country toward democracy. The liberals had been beaten down by the militarists who controlled the country in the past and needed to be encouraged to emerge and lead, noted Fellers, who had urged MacArthur against putting the emperor on trial as a war criminal. “The plan is practical,” he told Tregaskis, “and we’re going to let them do it.”

In his discussion with Tregaskis, Sutherland confirmed that Crist’s section would be dissolved and its functions absorbed by other departments, who would make reports to the supreme commander. “We’ll do the same thing with Military Government people that we’ll do with the (fighting) divisions—we’ll release ’em,” Sutherland told the reporter. “They were originally set up for a combat landing, like the divisions. They should be considered as divisions. We’re using those who are needed and releasing the rest—and some of those being released are inevitably going to be high-powered people. It can’t be helped.”

Tregaskis realized that MacArthur was sensitive to the call from many Americans, tired of war and its costs, for the government to send troops home and cut inductions into the armed services (the size of the U.S. military had been reduced throughout 1946, falling from 12 million to 1.5 million). In early 1946 wives of servicemen had organized “Bring Back Daddy” clubs to pressure Congress to speed up bringing their husbands home. Soldiers overseas had also organized protests lambasting plans by the War Department to slow demobilization. Tregaskis could not blame MacArthur “for a policy of expediency when the American people seemed to indicate they didn’t want to follow through either—that they didn’t want to send more boys and dollars to go out and police the world; at least, not until another war came along!”

With the Military Government Section reduced in importance, Tregaskis ended his “Road to Tokyo” series for the Post, returning to the United States to report and write for the magazine for the first five months in 1946 about how veterans were handling their return to civilian life.

Tregaskis, who had been covering the war for the past four years, had his own transition issues, including such simple problems as finding replacements for his size fourteen military issue footwear. Like most men who had been discharged from the army, navy, or marines, Tregaskis was “glad to be alive at the end of the war, to have both arms, both legs, both eyes and both ears; to be reasonably sane; and, immediately, to be able to get something to eat, to be able to bathe in warm water, to sleep between clean sheets.”

Coming from Tokyo, which had been “thoroughly poor, starving and devastated,” Tregaskis viewed his first port of call, San Francisco, as “a pleasant dream.” He went on “an innocent orgy” of window shopping, haunting department stores and making the circuit of hamburger stands, restaurants, and used-car emporiums. “It was a wonderful privilege,” he noted, “to be alive in this country where everyone in the ragamuffin remainder of the world would like to live; where everyone, comparatively, is wealthy.”