Chapter 342
Of course, in addition to these, what Yuri couldn't stand the most was the increasingly deteriorating military discipline and the General Headquarters's opinions on how to deal with Japanese war criminals.
Needless to say, military discipline. At this point, Yuri couldn't even see any military discipline in the American military.
Of course, Yuri does not think that the U.S. military is incapable of combat. On the contrary, he highly recognizes the combat effectiveness of the U.S. military in combat. He also knows that the U.S. military is very hard in training. However, in daily life, this powerful force seems to have changed its appearance. Their laxity and arbitrariness are simply jaw-dropping.
During his time in Tokyo, Yuri had seen American soldiers running naked on the streets twice. Fighting was even more common. If it were the Soviet army, such soldiers would have been dragged out and shot long ago.
Of course, the military discipline of the Soviet troops stationed in Japan was not much better. They also indulged in eating, drinking, gambling, and whoring. The Military Committee of the Far Eastern Front seemed to turn a blind eye to this. Tokyo seemed to have become a concentration camp for the scum troops. Yuri was very worried about whether these troops would still have the so-called combat effectiveness after staying in Tokyo for a period of time.
…
Tokyo was swelteringly hot in August, and the humid air was sticky and sour, as if every oxygen molecule carried a rotten smell, making it unbearable.
Directly opposite the Imperial Palace Square, there is a remnant of a building standing alone. The parking lot in front of the building is filled with all kinds of cars, the most of which are military jeeps. Surrounding the building, part of the U.S. Ninth Army has set up a strict blockade, prohibiting anyone without a pass from entering.
This building originally belonged to the Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company of Japan, but is now occupied by the Supreme Commander's General Headquarters. MacArthur's office is here, and of course, Yuri's office is also here.
As deputy commander-in-chief of the general headquarters, although Yuri has not been here for a long time, he still has a job of his own.
In terms of division of labor, MacArthur took advantage of his own strengths to take all the important tasks into his own hands, including: reform of economic institutions, that is, the confiscation of chaebol assets; reform of government institutions, that is, the abolition of existing institutions and the establishment of new institutions; restoration of civil rights, including the release of political prisoners and the abolition of the secret police; demilitarization, that is, the disbanding of the army and the National Volunteer Army, the destruction of various weapons, and so on.
As the deputy commander-in-chief, Yuri was responsible for tasks that were both troublesome and seemingly unimportant, such as eradicating Shintoism, revising the current Japanese constitution, and establishing the Far East Procuratorate to purge militarists.
These tasks are obviously not easy to do and can easily get you into trouble.
However, Yuri didn't care about these things. To him, these were good jobs. But the problem was that the specific executors of these jobs were all Americans. For example, MacArthur arranged for the commander of the Ninth Army, Eichelberg, to assist him in eradicating Shintoism, while he arranged for Brigadier General Courtney Whitney to assist him in revising the Japanese Constitution and clearing out militarists.
In other words, Yuri can issue relevant orders, but the executors of the orders are all US military generals, and even he himself does not know to what extent the corresponding orders can be executed.
However, Yuri was not so easy to talk to. Faced with the constraints of the Americans, he directly wrote a report to MacArthur, telling him to either dismiss Eichelberger and Whitney and let them go, or he would convene a working meeting of the Allied Forces Headquarters and bring the current problems he was facing to the meeting of representatives from various countries for discussion.
As Japan's various tasks were carried out, MacArthur himself was actually under great pressure. At present, the Far East Military Tribunal has not been established, and the Far East Commission has not been set up. The Far East Advisory Committee, which is composed of representatives from 11 countries, is responsible for handling the issue of war criminals with the General Headquarters.
Today, representatives of 11 countries have reached an agreement on the establishment of the Far East Military Tribunal. Australian Webb has been designated as the presiding judge, and the chief prosecutor is American jurist Keenan.
Within the Far Eastern Advisory Committee, representatives from six countries including China, the Soviet Union, Australia and New Zealand all believed that the Japanese emperor should be tried as a war criminal. Representatives from China, Australia and New Zealand even believed that Toshihiko Higashikuni, the current Prime Minister of Japan, should also be tried as a war criminal because he joined the war of aggression against China and commanded the Battle of Xuzhou.
MacArthur's plan to retain the emperor system for Japan was incomprehensible to Americans. Keenan, an American who served as the chief prosecutor, ridiculed MacArthur in front of the American media, and Webb, an Australian, questioned him in person, asking what the emperor, as his master, should do since his subordinates were all war criminals and had to stand trial?
All of this put a lot of pressure on MacArthur, forcing him to cooperate with Yuri on some issues and even make some compromises, because the fact was that if the representatives of the Soviet Union and the United States reached an agreement, representatives generally chose to swallow their anger.
In the end, Eichelberg's Ninth Army was transferred to destroy the confiscated Japanese weapons, and Brigadier General Whitney was appointed as the director of the Civil Affairs Bureau, responsible for the work of the Civil Affairs Bureau. As for the people who cooperated with Yuri's work, they were replaced by representatives of the Soviet side. Not only that, in order to ensure the strong implementation of the corresponding work, with the approval of MacArthur, Yuri transferred the 66th and 78th Infantry Divisions from the 35th Army to Tokyo through Lieutenant General Zakhvatayev.
On August 6, Yuri, the deputy commander-in-chief of the General Headquarters, issued his first order in nearly two months, which was to promote the work of eliminating Shintoism throughout Japan. All propaganda materials, symbols, ancestral temples, monuments and festivals related to Shintoism were strictly destroyed and banned. In this order, Yuri defined Shintoism as the ideological foundation of Japanese militarism, and believed that Japanese militarists used this religion to incite the fanatical nationalism of the Japanese people and advocated the establishment of a so-called Greater East Asia Common Sphere centered on Japan and with Shintoism as the ruling ideology. Therefore, Shintoism is a cult that must be eradicated.
In order to implement this order thoroughly, Yuri also issued a supplementary order to list the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo as a Shinto temple that must be demolished, and decided to build a "Memorial to the Victims of the Pacific and East Asian Battlefields of World War II" on the original site after the demolition of the ancestral temple.
After this order was issued, it was exposed by the Mainichi Shimbun before it was officially announced. For a time, it caused an uproar in Japan. For several consecutive days, thousands of Tokyo citizens gathered outside the Yasukuni Shrine. They launched a massive action to prevent the destruction of the Yasukuni Shrine and opposed the General Headquarters' execution of this order.
At the same time, the Japanese cabinet also expressed clear opposition to the order. Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshida Shigeru, State Minister Matsumoto Shoji, Constitutional Revision Committee Chairman Ashida Hitoshi and other important Japanese political figures visited Yuri for several consecutive days, hoping to persuade him to withdraw the order, but all failed.
However, Yuri was as tough as ever and refused to give in. In this matter, he was able to get the support of more than half of the representatives from the 11 countries. At the same time, as the representative of the United States, MacArthur obviously had no intention of stopping it.
In fact, Yuri understood MacArthur's plan. The reason why he remained silent on this matter was because he saw that Yuri's order would cause great problems. Given the boiling public resentment in Tokyo, forcibly demolishing the Yasukuni Shrine would most likely lead to bloody conflicts, thus causing a storm in public opinion.
But even though he understood this, Yuri had no fear. To be honest, the position of commander-in-chief might be very important to MacArthur, but for him, leaving Tokyo as soon as possible and returning to Moscow was the best option... He had not appeared in front of Comrade Stalin for two months. Far away from Moscow, he was holding such an insignificant position in Tokyo. Yuri really had no interest in it at all.
If the demolition of the Yasukuni Shrine really triggered bloodshed, so what? The worst result would be to be dismissed from his post as commander-in-chief and sent back to Moscow, which was exactly what he wanted. Moreover, the Yasukuni Shrine also enshrines the Japanese soldiers who died in the Russo-Japanese War and the Battle of Nomonhan. A few days ago, Prince Toshihiko Tokuguni presided over a "temporary soul-calling ceremony" and enshrined the tablets of hundreds of thousands of Kwantung Army generals who died and were captured in Northeast China. Yuri was sure that Comrade Stalin would never punish him for this. In today's Soviet Union, Comrade Stalin is the highest-ranking Great Russian chauvinist. He still remembers the failure of the Russo-Japanese War and the subsequent series of blackmails by Japan against the new Soviet regime. I believe he would like such revenge.
Therefore, at Yuri's insistence, on August 12, the Soviet army dispatched six tanks and two battalions of troops to forcibly demolish the Yasukuni Shrine. During the demolition operation, petitioners gathered near the shrine clashed with Soviet soldiers who were carrying out the mission, which ultimately resulted in the death of twelve people, nearly three hundred injuries, and hundreds of people were forcibly arrested.
The bloodshed caused an uproar internationally, and despite inconsistent reactions from all parties, Yuri was removed from his post as deputy commander-in-chief the next day, and he would be replaced by Timoshenko.
