Honor Guard to History Butler man, 88, served under MacArthur
It was late autumn 1945 in Tokyo.
Pvt. Clyde “Red” Mills, 19, stood at attention under the withering gaze of the U.S. Armed Forces’ most powerful commander in the Pacific theater.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur was inspecting his new honor guard. And Mills had a bloody lip.
“I’m fair-skinned and prone to infections,” Mills, 88, of Butler recalled 70 years later. “There was a sore on my lower lip and it started bleeding — right before the inspection. I kept sucking on it to keep the blood from getting on my uniform — and not just because of the inspection. We had to pay to clean our own uniforms.”
Mills made it through the inspection and served proudly as a member of the general’s 200-man honor guard until his discharge two years later.
How Mills got on the roster is pure happenstance.
Butler to TokyoMills graduated from Butler High School in June 1944 — the same month as the bloody D-Day invasion of Normandy in France. He got a job pushing a hot dog cart through the Armco factory, a job he did until he was drafted the following year — by then the Germans had surrendered, ending the war in Europe. But the war with Japan continued in the PacificAfter basic training at Camp Blanding, Fla., and advanced infantry training at Camp Gordon, Ga., Mills went by rail to San Francisco to catch a ship to Japan.But his Pacific crossing hit logistical snags at both ends.“At Frisco, the harbor was full of Navy ships coming in for repairs,” Mills said. “So we got back on the trains and went to Seattle. That’s where we sailed from.”There was a port reassignment at the other end too, but for more tragic reasons than ship repairs.“We were supposed to land in Hiroshima,” Mills said. “We landed in Osaka instead.”Only a few weeks earlier on Aug. 6, Hiroshima had been leveled by an atomic bomb. The bomb instantly killed 80,000 people; a second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki two days later killed 40,000.Over the ensuing weeks another 100,000 died slow, agonizing deaths from exposure to radiation.Osaka is about 200 miles east of Hiroshima, and 300 miles west of Tokyo.
Supreme commanderMacArthur was the supreme commander over the entire Pacific area when he accepted Japan’s surrender in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945. He oversaw the occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1951.As the effective ruler of Japan, McArthur directed sweeping economic, political and social changes. He was credited with writing the nation’s new constitution.“I, a professional soldier, had the civil responsibility and absolute control over almost 80 million people,” MacArthur wrote in his memoir, “Reminiscences,” “and I would maintain that control until Japan had once more demonstrated that it was ready, willing and able to become a responsible member of the family of free nations.”MacArthur lived with his wife, Jean, and young son, Arthur, in the U.S. ambassador’s residence behind the embassy in Tokyo. He set up headquarters on the sixth floor of the Dai Ichi Mutual Life Insurance building, which towered over the emperor’s palace.
<b>Chosen at random</b>One of MacArthur’s many early actions established a ceremonial honor guard to watch over the residence and headquarters.“We were chosen at random,” said Mills of being among the honor guard.He was celebrating Thanksgiving Day 1945 in Osaka when he learned he’d been tapped for the special duty.“The qualifications were pretty simple. You had to be at least 5 feet-10 inches tall and have an IQ of 110 or higher.”The guard unit was housed in a building on the embassy grounds. Mills routinely served four hours on duty and eight hours off, guarding the entrances and grounds of the ambassador’s residence and the Dai Ichi headquarters.“I liked guarding the house. I got the see very important visitors coming and going all the time,” Mills said. “We had the authority to turn away any visitor below the rank of four-star general.”Emperor Hirohito was a regular visitor, as were other dignitaries and influential leaders — all paying their respects to the supreme leader.Mills said the unofficial part of the job included keeping an eye on young Arthur and the family dog, making sure neither wandered off the grounds.“I felt a little sorry for the boy,” Mills said. “He didn’t have other kids to play with.”Mills recalls one day being pulled into an emergency assignment, filling in for a member of the general’s daily escort to headquarters when a regular member of the escort failed to show.Along the route to the Dai Ichi Building, the landscape of abject poverty and destruction left a deep impression on Mills.“I remember people everywhere, scrambling to get out of the way,” he said. “Many were so poor, they were carrying everything they owned on their backs.”All bowed submissively as MacArthur’s motorcade drove past. Most were homeless, had nowhere to go, and were crushed after four years of propaganda had convinced them that Japan was winning the war.‘Completely crushed’MacArthur held a similar view.In his memoir he wrote: “Never in history had a nation and its people been more completely crushed than were the Japanese at the end of the war.“They had suffered more than a military debacle, more than the destruction of their armed forces, more than the elimination of their industrial bases, more even than the occupation of their land by foreign bayonets. Their entire faith in the Japanese way of life, cherished as the invincible for many centuries, perished in the agony of their total defeat.”There were periods of high alert, although none of the alerts amounted to an actual threat, Mills said. During the high alerts, he and other guards were posted around the perimeter of the residence — his customary post was near a Chinese museum across the street.MacArthur was a notoriously dedicated worker. The Japanese people revere him for completely rebuilding their economy, culture and political system, blending the best of Eastern and Western customs and values — and including the people in the rebuilding process.That was accomplished in just four years — MacArthur handed control of the country back to the Japanese in 1949.Needless to say, driven leaders tend not to be self-indulgent. But there was one perk Mills fondly remembers: Movie Night.“Every Wednesday night, off-duty guards were welcome to watch movies with the general and his wife at their residence,” Mills recalled. “The movies were new releases, too. It seemed like we got the new movies before the rest of America got them sometimes.”Jean MacArthur “was a very nice lady,” Mills said. She was cheerful, polite and kind.As for photographs of MacArthur smoking that iconic, oversized corncob pipe, Mills said it might have been all for show.“In two years I never did see him with a pipe,” Mills said. “But I usually sat behind him and his wife on Movie Night. And he usually was smoking a White Owl cigar. He liked his White Owls.”Mills returned to the United States in 1948 and married a Butler native, Jacqueline DellaSanta. They had two sons, Douglas (“naturally,” Mills said) and Roger.He got a job with West Penn Power Co. His career with West Penn Power endured 41 years until his retirement in 1989 as the Butler Division’s accounting director.His wife died in 2001 after 47 years of marriage.
