General Order No. 1

On 17 August 1945 President Harry Truman approved the final version of General Order No. 1 – the document that was to tell Japanese forces throughout Asia and the Pacific to whom they should lay down their arms. On paper it was a technical instrument: a list of areas with the Allied commanders assigned to them. In practice the lines drawn in a few sentences of this order decided who would occupy Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, northern Indochina and the Kurils after the war, and shaped the political map of East Asia for decades.

The date of 17 August is given by, among others, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and most studies. It does, however, need qualifying: as early as his message to Joseph Stalin of 15 August Truman wrote that he had “approved” the order, and quoted its full text. 17 August was therefore the day on which a text revised after the exchange with Moscow – with the Kurils in the Soviet zone – was adopted, rather than the day of its first approval.

Haste in Washington

Until August 1945 American planners had assumed that the war with Japan would last many more months and that surrender would come only after an invasion of the home islands. A few days changed everything. On 8 August the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and the next day the Red Army launched its offensive in Manchuria, advancing at a pace nobody in Washington had foreseen. On 10 August Tokyo announced that it accepted the Potsdam Declaration with a reservation concerning the prerogatives of the Emperor. It now had to be settled at once who would accept the surrender of millions of Japanese soldiers scattered from Manchuria to New Guinea, and where.

The task fell to the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) and staff officers in the Pentagon. During the night of 10–11 August two colonels from the strategic planning section, Dean Rusk – later Secretary of State – and Charles H. Bonesteel III, were instructed to delineate an American occupation zone in Korea. According to Rusk’s recollections they had about half an hour to do it and worked from a map in National Geographic magazine. They chose the 38th parallel because it divided the peninsula roughly in half and – most importantly – left Seoul on the American side. Rusk later admitted that the line lay further north than American troops could realistically reach before Soviet forces did. No expert on Korea was consulted, and the two officers – as historians note – did not know that Russia and Japan had discussed dividing Korea along the same line at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Successive versions of the draft passed through the Joint Chiefs of Staff and reached the President. At the same time they were agreed with London, where Clement Attlee’s cabinet was now in office.

The content of the order

The order was framed as an instruction from Japanese Imperial General Headquarters issued at the Emperor’s behest: all Japanese commanders at home and abroad were to cease fighting immediately, lay down their arms, remain in place and surrender unconditionally to the designated Allied commanders. The basic division, as worded in the message to Stalin of 15 August, was as follows:

• China (excluding Manchuria), Taiwan and French Indochina north of the 16th parallel – Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek;
• Manchuria, Korea north of the 38th parallel and the Japanese part of Sakhalin (Karafuto) – the Commander-in-Chief of Soviet Forces in the Far East, Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky;
• the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Burma, Thailand, Indochina south of the 16th parallel, Malaya, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands – Admiral Louis Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command or the commander of the Australian forces, the division between them to be agreed by the parties themselves;
• the Japanese mandated islands, the Ryukyus, the Bonins and the other Pacific islands – the Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester Nimitz;
• the Japanese home islands, Korea south of the 38th parallel and the Philippines – the Commander-in-Chief of US Army Forces in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur, who was also to become Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers.

In the final text published on 2 September the extent of the zones was somewhat refined: the Ryukyus passed to MacArthur’s zone, Mountbatten received, among other areas, Sumatra, Java, Celebes and Dutch New Guinea, and the Australian commander, General Thomas Blamey, received Borneo, British New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands.

Further clauses required the Japanese to hand over complete lists of units, ships, aircraft, airfields, minefields and depots, to keep weapons and equipment intact, and to report the locations of Allied prisoners of war and interned civilians and ensure their protection. Police in the home islands were to keep their arms until further notice and remain responsible for public order.

The division of Indochina at the 16th parallel was not new: it had been agreed at Potsdam in July, and the order merely confirmed it. For the Vietnamese it meant that the north of the country would be occupied by Chinese troops and the south by British ones, who would open the way for the French to return. Similarly, Mountbatten’s zone included Java and Sumatra, where on that same 17 August Indonesian independence was proclaimed – so the question of who would disarm the Japanese was decided without the Indonesians or the Vietnamese having any say.

Stalin, the Kurils and Hokkaido

On 15 August, the day the Japanese heard the Emperor’s broadcast, Truman sent the text of the order to Stalin, Attlee and Chiang Kai-shek. Stalin replied on 16 August. He raised no objection to the line in Korea – which surprised the Americans, since Soviet troops could at that point easily have occupied the whole peninsula – but he demanded two changes. First, he wanted all the Kuril Islands, which under the agreement reached at the Yalta Conference were to go to the USSR, included in the Soviet zone. Second, he demanded the northern half of Hokkaido – north of a line from Kushiro on the east coast to Rumoi on the west. He justified this by the Japanese occupation of the Soviet Far East in 1919–1921, and argued that Soviet public opinion would be “seriously offended” if Soviet troops were not given a zone on the territory of Japan proper.

Truman’s reply, which reached Moscow on 18 August, accepted the first demand and rejected the second. The President agreed to amend the order so that all the Kurils would surrender to the Soviet command, but demanded for the United States the right to an air base on one of the islands, preferably in the central part of the chain. Hokkaido, however, like Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu, was to surrender to MacArthur; at most the USSR could contribute a token contingent to the Allied occupation. Stalin wrote back on 22 August with evident resentment: he had not expected such a reply, and he rejected the demand for a base in the Kurils, pointing out that it was provided for neither by the Yalta nor by the Potsdam decisions and that such demands were usually made of a defeated state. According to researchers, among them Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, it was on 22 August that Stalin called off the planned landing on Hokkaido.

Soviet forces had begun occupying the Kurils as early as 18 August, landing on Shumshu, where the Japanese put up fierce resistance. By early September they had taken the whole archipelago, including the southernmost islands, whose ownership remains in dispute between Russia and Japan to this day.

The road to 2 September

The order did not come into force the moment Truman signed it. Its text was handed, together with other surrender documents, to the Japanese delegation that was at MacArthur’s headquarters in Manila on 19 and 20 August. It was formally issued by MacArthur on 2 September 1945, after the signing of the instrument of Japan’s surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri; on the same day Japanese Imperial General Headquarters passed it on to its forces. It also became the first directive of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAPIN-1).

The text did not settle every dispute. Hong Kong lay in the “Chinese” zone, but the British insisted that the surrender in the colony be accepted by their own commander; Truman sided with London, and Chiang Kai-shek, though he protested, eventually acquiesced. In China the order gave the right to accept the surrender to Chiang Kai-shek alone, which the Chinese Communists regarded as aimed at them – the struggle for Japanese weapons and for the cities held by the Japanese became one of the sparks of the civil war.

Significance

General Order No. 1 was conceived as a temporary division of military tasks, but many of its lines proved lasting. Soviet troops stopped at the 38th parallel in Korea, and American forces under General John R. Hodge landed at Incheon on 8 September. In 1948 the occupation zones turned into two Korean states, and in 1950 the Korean War broke out. North of the 16th parallel in Indochina, Chinese troops found the newborn Democratic Republic of Vietnam; in the south the British helped the French return to Saigon. Taiwan was taken over by the authorities of the Republic of China, who four years later took refuge there after losing the civil war. The Kurils and southern Sakhalin remained in the USSR, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers who surrendered in the Soviet zone were sent to labour camps in Siberia and Central Asia – according to various estimates, from about 560,000 to more than 600,000 men, tens of thousands of whom never returned. At the same time, the refusal over Hokkaido meant that Japan – unlike Germany and Korea – was not divided into occupation zones and for years to come remained under almost exclusive American control.