The dust jacket of this book shows two heads confronting one another: General MacArthur, aggressive, arrogant, defiantly puffing cigar smoke at the world at large; the Emperor Hirohito, impassive, phlegmatic, quietly obstinate. The subtitle, ‘MacArthur, Hirohito and the American Duel with Japan’, similarly suggests that within the book a double biography will be found. The formula can work effectively. Hitler and Stalin, Wellington and Napoleon, were titanic figures whose careers meshed closely, each having the other frequently in his thoughts, each consciously or unconsciously adjusting his behaviour in reaction to the other. The trouble about this book is that MacArthur and Hirohito do not relate to each other in this way. They are ships that pass in the night, meeting fleetingly at a moment of high importance but for the greater part of their lives in no way concerned about or relevant to each other. Hirohito would probably not have survived as emperor if MacArthur had wanted to bring about his abdication or put him on trial for war crimes; but even this is uncertain: MacArthur’s authority was great but the powers-that-be in Washington had concluded that the preservation of the Japanese empire was on balance in America’s interest, and the General’s vice-regal powers were constantly checked by his political masters. Beyond this, the two men had remarkably little impact on each other. Robert Harvey’s object, he tells us, is to ‘weave the story into a single whole’. The task is probably impossible; what we in fact get is two stories in somewhat uneasy juxtaposition.
MacArthur himself was a truly titanic figure. Immensely brave, a brilliant fighting soldier, a leader of charismatic quality, in some ways genuinely an idealist, his character was marred by excessive pride, vanity and a megalomaniac rejection of anything he saw as hostile criticism. He was in some ways extraordinarily lucky; twice his career seemed to have ship-wrecked and he found himself relegated to sterile backwaters, twice chance plucked him forth to attain fresh glories. His apotheosis, in Bataan, represented a crushing defeat for American arms and ended with him abandoning his troops to flee to Australia. He did this on the categorical orders of the President and deserves no blame, but he could hardly have imagined that he would find himself a hero as a result. In fact he was acclaimed as the symbol of the American will to fight on and in the end defeat the Japanese. ‘I shall return’, the last words of the communiqué which he issued on his arrival in Melbourne, became, in Harvey’s words, ‘the cornerstone of the MacArthur legend, one of the most famous utterances by a general in history’.
Compared with MacArthur’s flamboyance, Hirohito was the dingiest of grey. Phrases like ‘ “I see,” said the Emperor in an uncharacteristically strong voice’ do not suggest a man who held passionate opinions or expressed such opinions as he did have with any great conviction. When asked what he did during the revolutionary Terror, the Abbé Sieyès replied with some satisfaction: ‘I survived.’ Hirohito could have said the same about the second world war. To have done so argues tenacity, limited cunning and a capacity for not giving offence unnecessarily. But there was not a lot more to it than that. Hirohito was of interest for what he was, not for what he did, and where deeds are concerned he is of more interest for what he left undone. A godlike figure who in the eyes of most of his people enjoyed absolute power, he disapproved of the attack on the United States and yet was impotent to prevent it. In August 1945 he believed that surrender was essential, yet he could not have imposed it if a majority of his most powerful ministers had not reached the same conclusion. Never did he take a strong independent line; for the most part he drifted, more or less helplessly, in the wake of whoever happened to be in power.
For a writer as experienced as Robert Harvey, there is a curious sloppiness of thought and inexactitude of language. Conditions in the Japanese mines were ‘quite literally satanic’ — a phrase which suggests a surprisingly well-informed knowledge of affairs in the underworld. Events in Japan in the late 1920s and 1930s ‘unfolded like Shakespearian tragedy’. Which tragedy, one wonders, and why Shakespeare? Of MacArthur in 1949 the author writes:
There was even an attempt to have him replaced as supreme commander by Kennan and Dean Acheson, the aristocratic, crusty Secretary of State who detested MacArthur, by General Maxwell Taylor, but this failed.
One can work out what he means, but only just.
This is perhaps nit-picking. Harvey has written a competent study of an important and dramatic period. Neither as history nor as biography does it excel, but it is readable and contains much material that will be new to anyone except the specialist. The author has no axe to grind and his presentation of his principal characters is fair and convincing. By character and ability MacArthur was one of the more remarkable figures of the second world war; by birth and position Hirohito was unique: the two are well worth writing about. Though two separate biographies might have been more satisfactory, in a hurried world some may be grateful that Harvey has given us both for the price of one.
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