General Douglas MacArthur and the Japanese surrender - 16 August 1985

“Morning’s at seven,” the poet said. Only a bouncing, moral Victorian could have said it.

Even on Long Island, morning’s at ten for me, a creepy, still time time disturbed only by the bleat of the morning doves and the two-tone salute of the bobwhite, our resident quail, and the prolonged parody performance of every bird in sight by that preposterous show-off, the mocking bird.

Last spring my oldest friend in both senses came to stay with us on our high bluff at the end of Long Island, a man devoted to country matters, revelling in a spot where there is nothing but sky and a vast shining bay and wild cherry and a pine or two etched against it and sand and not a house or a human in sight.

We were sitting out on the terrace in perfect peace except, as I say, for the pandemonium of the birds – it was after all spring and our peninsula is a bird sanctuary – and my old friend said, “This is perfection. There’s only one thing I miss here.” “And what is that?” I said. “Birdsong” he said. “Bird what?” I shouted to override the symphony of the little beasts on the wing.

I knew then that his deafness which had been deepening for years was at that tedious stage with confident old men when they accuse their bawling sons and daughters of mumbling. His wife suggested to me in a very confidential moment in a dark corner that perhaps I was the only friend who might hint to him that the time had arrived for a hearing aid. He is a proud man and no man is so proud as an old deaf man who believes the rest of the world has taken to whispering and muttering.

I did write, in what I hope is the easy, familiar style I’d been writing to him for years and got back the only peppery, insulted note he’d ever written – to me that is. We said no more and his wife has borne up ever since under the daily complaint that she’s a mumbler. Well my old friend has gone now, to the end maintaining his beliefs that (a) his hearing was sound and (b) the only thing we lacked in our island retreat was birdsong.

This pastoral theme comes up partly, I suppose, out of an earnest desire to boast that for me today, which is the day I’m improvising or composing this talk, morning did begin at seven because I had to tape the piece very early and be off out of New York to Kennedy Airport and pick up two old friends flying in from London. So I wish to go on record as having been up at six-thirty.

I am, I was, in the city and looking out on a sunny, dense heat haze over Central Park which was a harmless sight since the only sound in my room was the very gentle breathing of the air conditioning. Well I was chewing on my awful bran – bulk, you know, or if you didn’t your doctor’s likely these days to tell you that your survival depends upon it – when there was a firm thump outside the kitchen door and whereas in other countries the morning newspaper may arrive as a flutter or a sound like a soft-shoe dance, the New York Times arrives with a thump.

It was only 96 pages today so that was a thumping day. On Sundays it arrives with a thunderclap since it runs to three or four hundred pages. It was nice to discover, for once, that I could be ahead of anybody with the morning news. I am cantankerous enough to refuse to watch any television before the big news programmes at 7pm unless, of course, some president of a big business firm is being bawled out by a Senate committee.

We have one television channel which starts at ten in the morning and does nothing but televise important Senate committee hearings and, when Congress is in session, follows the entire debates in the House of Representatives. But Congress is home now chewing away at the hot grass roots, so the New York Times was as usual my introduction to the woes and wonders of the world, and what is the first thing I see?

A photograph of a kindly, smiling, dark-eyed man bending over to embrace a tiny, very frail, very white-haired, very old little lady. Behind them was some sort of navy or air force brass. Brass is the wrong word, I guess, since he was all in white and offering his hand to a plump, smiling, grizzled man. I don’t know who the navy man was but I recognised in old grizzle Secretary of State George Schultz.

I wasn’t sure about the kindly, smiling character but who was the bent, frail, little old lady? That was the shocker. The caption read – and I had to believe it – “Defence Secretary Casper W Weinberger greeting Jean MacArthur, 86-year-old widow of the general of the army Douglas MacArthur on the deck of the aircraft carrier Enterprise yesterday in San Francisco. With them for a ceremony marking the 40th anniversary of the end of World War Two was Secretary of State George P Schultz.”

I appreciate that this will be no shock to the generations that never heard of Jean MacArthur, that may have only the dimmest notion who General MacArthur was, let alone having to look up in the books the dates of World War Two, but I had the kind of shock that you young man, young lady, will have when some time from now you see a photograph of some important public official bending over a frail old lady and the caption reads “The President or the Secretary so and so greeting the former Raquel Welch”. Do not mock the old, nor the young either. Their time will come.

Well, when I saw that picture I at once saw another picture in my mind – a newsreel picture which is the one that flashes to mind whenever anyone mentions the end of the second war. The picture is the deck of a battleship. The battleship is the USS Missouri. It is anchored in Tokyo Bay. In a neatly cleared space in front of American sailors stacked up on every level of the ship stand two rows of men, one of high-ranking American navy men – they are standing in smart order behind a table.

In front of the table stand two or three small, quaint Japanese gentlemen in morning coats. At the table sits the ultimate Roman general of our time with the imperious profile and the baritone voice as impressive as that of Orson Welles. The Roman is General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, the hero of the Pacific war, which has finally come to an end. It came to an end on 14 August 1945 when Japan, still rumbling in the reverberation of the two atomic bombs, the first dropped on Hiroshima and the second on Nagasaki, at last gave up.

The surrender ceremony, the signing of the Instrument, took place two weeks later on 2 September and that was the scene being marked, as the paper said, on its 40th anniversary. What brings the scene on the Missouri alive to me is the accompanying sound, almost more than the sight. There was a huge silence moderated only by the faintest breeze wafting the flags. The quaint men in cutaways advanced. One was an admiral and he leaned over and put down his signature to the paper. He bowed. He stepped back. He bowed again, and the second war was officially over when the Roman general pronounced in his organ tones four ever-memorable words, “These proceedings are closed”.

This, of course, has been a summer, a spring and summer, of anniversary. First D-Day and the Allied leaders in France and the awful gaffe of the visit to the German cemetery. I can’t tell you and I won’t bore you by marking off all the domestic anniversaries that were noted in passing. It was odd and sad, I thought, that the papers passed by without noting the 40th anniversary of that stunned Thursday when the country seemed suddenly to have lost its father, the day Roosevelt died down in Georgia.

Of course last week we had the longest, gravest recollections and editorial pieces on Hiroshima and saw the eerie Japanese peace ceremonies and once again the controversy was revived about whether or not the bombs need ever have been dropped. Now finally, let us hope, the anniversary of the Japanese surrender. Maybe we can now go back to living history instead of embalming it.

The two friends from England I was to meet at the airport had written querulous little notes, fearful of New York’s reputation for summer heat and I’d been assuring them for months that since May we’d had only a week or so of atrocious heat and for most of the time wonderful stretches more like the fall, 80 degrees, brilliant days, clear as a bell, silvery, bone-dry thanks to the blessed import of the Canadian north-west wind.

So, wouldn’t you know, they came out of their cool plane and the air-conditioned Kennedy Airport and walked outside into a furnace, the hottest, sweatiest, most rancid day of the year. Now that was in the east. Summer is the craziest time over the whole continent – Galveston, Texas lashed by a hurricane and then a lurch of cold air out of Canada on to the hot inland plains produced in one place a three-foot deposit of hail, millions of golf balls, as they say, which slaughtered pigs and cattle.

Here in New York the mayor, Mayor Koch, is in a frightful tizzy. We’ve had only spasms of heavy rain infrequently for four months. The reservoirs are low, some of them are cracking, so he’s slapping $200 fines on anybody who dares wash a car and $500 on what he calls “the water rats”, people who have a sprinkler set to go off sneakily at 4am to water their lawn.

I’ve just looked again at that incredible picture of the frail old widow of General MacArthur and it brought back another picture of another very old figure in a dressing gown, his once leathery frame reduced to a skeleton on which hung limp flesh, his eyes large and startled. He was sitting in a hospital chair and by his side a cheerful, trim man, the President of the United States, one Lyndon B Johnson. The president had come to call on the frail old man in the hospital.

The old shrunken man was General of the Army Douglas MacArthur. He’d requested the meeting. He wanted to, and did, urge on Johnson never to commit American forces to the Asian mainland. Alas nobody listened to him.

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