Charles Andrew Willoughby (8 March 1892 – 25 October 1972) was a major general in the U.S. Army who was General of the Army Douglas MacArthur's chief of military intelligence during World War II and the Korean War.
An immigrant from Germany who graduated from Gettysburg College in 1913, Willoughby was commissioned in the infantry in August 1916 under the name Adolph Charles Weidenbach. He served in France in World War I in the American Expeditionary Force with the 1st Infantry Division and the United States Army Air Service as an instructor at the American Aviation School at Issoudon. In May 1918 he was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he helped organise the United States' first airmail delivery service, and changed his name to Charles Andrew Willoughby.
After the war, Willoughby returned to the infantry as a company and battalion commander in the 24th Infantry, one of the two U.S. Army's two African-American regiments, and the Puerto-Rican 65th Infantry. Fluent in English, Spanish, German and French (and later Japanese), he then became a military attaché, and served at the American legations in Caracas, Venezuela, Bogotá, Colombia, and Quito, Ecuador.
During and after World War II Willoughby was the assistant chief of staff for intelligence (G-2) on MacArthur's United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) staff during the 1941–1942 Philippines campaign, during which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for valor. He accompanied Douglas MacArthur's escape from the Philippines in PT boats in March 1942, and served as G-2 with General Headquarters (GHQ) Southwest Pacific Area in Australia, New Guinea
and the Philippines. In August 1945, he met the Japanese surrender delegation headed by Lieutenant General Torashirō Kawabe to negotiate the details of the Occupation of Japan.
Willoughby continued to serve MacArthur as G-2 at GHQ of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) and the Far East Command (FECOM). Willoughby's contribution during the Korean War is subject to significant controversy, due to the failure to anticipate the outbreak of the war and the Chinese intervention in it. After MacArthur was recalled in April 1951, he chose to retire from the Army in September. He was the editor of the Foreign Intelligence Digest until 1961, and published a book on MacArthur's campaigns in the Pacific.
Early life and education
Willoughby claimed to have been born on 8 March 1892, in Heidelberg, Germany, as Adolph Karl Weidenbach, the son of Baron T. Tscheppe-Weidenbach and wife Emma Willoughby Tscheppe-Weidenbach of Baltimore, Maryland. This was disputed by Frank Kluckhohn of The Reporter (New York Journal) in 1952, and there remains uncertainty as to both his birth name and lineage. (whose name was spelt with only one "p") did not have the title of "Freiherr" and did not receive letters patent from Kaiser Wilhelm II granting him the use of the surname "von Tschepe und Weidenbach" until 1913. He had five children, but none of them were Adolph Karl Weidenbach or born in 1892. The German news magazine Der Spiegel found an 8 March 1892 entry in the Heidelberg registry recording the birth of Adolf August Weidenbach, with ropemaker August Weidenbach as father and Emma, née Langhäuser.
He emigrated from Germany to the U.S. in 1910, and on 10 October 1910 he enlisted in the United States Army, where he served with Company K of the 5th Infantry, initially as a private, later rising to the rank of sergeant. He was honorably discharged from the army on 9 October 1913. He then entered Gettysburg College as a senior in 1913 based on his attestations of three years of attendance at the University of Heidelberg and the Sorbonne in Paris before he emigrated to the United States. It is disputed whether he actually did attend either European university, as he would have had to do so at an unusually young age. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1914, and became a language teacher at the Howe School, a private girls' school in Howe, Indiana, and Racine College in Racine, Wisconsin. He began studying for a Master of Arts degree at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas.
World War I
thumb|right|Willoughby in 1918
After graduation from Gettysburg College, he was commissioned a major in the Officers' Volunteer Reserve Corps of the U.S. Army in May 1914. He spent three months teaching German and military studies at various prep-schools in the United States. He changed his name to Charles Andrew Willoughby, a loose translation of Weidenbach, the German for "willow brook".
Between the wars
After the war ended, Willoughby did not remain in the Air Service, but returned to the infantry, and commanded demonstration machine gun units at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia.
This was followed by temporary duty with the Military Intelligence Division at the War Department to prepare Willoughby for his next assignment, as a military attaché.
Willoughby was also the editor of the Review of Current Military Literature (which became Quarterly Review of Military Literature in September 1932, and is today the Military Review), from July 1932 to May 1934. Although not the first editor of the journal, he was the first whose name appeared on the masthead. He then attended the Army War College in Washington, D.C. After graduation in July 1936, he returned to the Infantry School at Fort Benning as an instructor, His citation read:
Willoughby met Clare Boothe Luce when she arrived in the Philippines to profile MacArthur, they began affair. Luce would later describe Willoughby as "the one man that I could have run away with".
Southwest Pacific Area
Willoughby was one of the key staff officers who accompanied Douglas MacArthur's escape from the Philippines in PT boats in March 1942.
Willoughby, who was promoted to major general on 17 March 1945, habitually conducted himself as a European aristocrat, clicking his heels and bowing when introduced to someone, and kissing women's hands. He still spoke with a slight German accent. He wore tailored uniforms, and sometimes a monocle. Behind his back, staff officers called him "Baron von Willoughby", "Sir Charles" or "Bonnie Prince Charles". Raymond D. Tarbuck, a naval officer on the GHQ staff, characterised Willoughby as "a Prussian type. All he needed was a spiked helmet." But another staff officer considered that there was "more of von Stroheim than von Rundstedt about him".
Occupation of Japan
At Nichols Field near Manila on 16 August 1945, Willoughby met the Japanese surrender delegation headed by Lieutenant General Torashirō Kawabe to negotiate the details of the Occupation of Japan. The talks were conducted in German. Willoughby became G-2 at GHQ of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). He therefore had two intelligence staffs: the G-2 section of the Far East Command (FECOM), which concentrated on military intelligence in East Asia, and the G-2 section of SCAP, which was responsible for civic intelligence and counter intelligence in Japan, and for enforcing SCAPIN-33 (Press code for Japan) for censorship of the Japanese press. Both staffs were decimated by post-war demobilization and budget cuts. Most of the available resources were devoted to Japan.
thumb|left|Willoughby with members of the Japanese surrender arrangement delegation. Lieutenant General [[Torashirō Kawabe stands next to him.]]
Willoughby married Marie Antionette de Becker, who had been held as an internee in the Santo Tomas Internment Camp during the war. She was the sister of Edith Frances de Becker Sebald, who was married to William J. Sebald, MacArthur's political advisor. Willoughby also had a Japanese mistress, Araki Mitsuko, the wife of a former Tokyo Imperial University professor, who was an important source of information on GHQ for the Japanese government.
Many of the 1.5 million Japanese soldiers returning from captivity in the Soviet Union were suspected of Communist sympathies, but demobilization reduced ATIS to a fraction of its former self, and there were not enough linguists to process more than a small fraction of them. Eventually, 9,000 were extensively interrogated, but only the most important in more than a cursory fashion. Willoughby established a Civil Intelligence Section to weed out reactionaries and persons opposed to the democratization of Japan. It controlled the 441st Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment, which looked out for spies and subversive activities.
Willoughby alleged that an American, Agnes Smedley, was a member of Richard Sorge's Soviet spy ring that operated in China and Japan before and during the war. He tracked down information on Smedley, which he presented to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. He eventually wrote a book on the spy ring, Shanghai Conspiracy, which was published in 1952. He also suspected Beate Sirota Gordon, who helped write the Constitution of Japan, of being connected to Sorge. The G-2 section compiled extensive files on "Leftist infiltration in SCAP", and Willoughby went out of his way to track and discredit thinkers left of himself. He investigated New Dealers in Charles Louis Kades's Government Section, an endeavor that included blacklisting economist Eleanor Hadley such that she could not obtain a steady government job in the United States for seventeen years.
Kawabe and Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, the former chief of intelligence at Imperial General Headquarters, led a clandestine intelligence network Willoughby established to gather intelligence on the Japanese Communist Party, but it was penetrated by Communist Chinese intelligence. Arisue recruited some 200 former Japanese Army officers, including Masanobu Tsuji and Takushiro Hattori, to assist American historian Gordon Prange with his work on the history of the campaigns in the Southwest Pacific. Tsuji became involved with the recruitment of former Japanese Army personnel to assist Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan as part of Willoughby's plans for a Nationalist Chinese invasion of mainland China. The plans were shelved when it became clear that the preparations had been detected by the Communist Chinese. A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report described Hattori and Tsuji as "extremely irresponsible", and characterized Tsuji as "the type of man who, given the chance, would start World War III without any misgivings."
By July 1952, Tsuji had become convinced that cooperation with the Americans was the best path to Japanese rearmament, but Hattori had not. He hatched a plot to assassinate then-prime minister Shigeru Yoshida and replace him with Ichirō Hatoyama, who was much more hawkish and eager to re-militarize Japan. Tsuji persuaded Hattori to hold off, although he continued to plot assassinations of other officials. G-2 funding of the group ended in 1952 in anticipation of the end of the occupation, and in April Hattori was informed that his position as chief of the Historical Records Department in G-2 would be terminated. Tsuji was elected to the National Diet in 1952, and Hatoyama eventually replaced Yoshida in 1954.
Willoughby edited a history of MacArthur's Pacific campaigns, which was published in 1966 as The Reports of General MacArthur in four volumes. He also edited a ten-volume Intelligence Series on the activities of G-2 in SWPA and SCAP. In 1947, he arranged for two scientists from Fort Detrick, Maryland, Edwin Hill and Joseph Victor, to interview Shirō Ishii about biological warfare information gathered by Unit 731, a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation in China.
Korean War
thumb|right|Willoughby (second from left) confers with Lieutenant General [[Matthew B. Ridgway (center) and CIA Director Walter B. Smith (right) in Korea In mid-January 1951 ]]
Willoughby's contribution during the Korean War is subject to significant controversy. A failure was not anticipating the outbreak of the war on 25 June 1950. Matthew Aid concluded that:
Several sources insist that Willoughby intentionally distorted, if not out and out suppressed, intelligence estimates that showed the Chinese were massing at the Yalu River. He allegedly did so in order to better support MacArthur's (mistaken) assertion that the Chinese would never cross the Yalu, and thus allow MacArthur a freer hand in his drive to the Yalu. Lieutenant Colonel John Chiles, the X Corps G-3, claimed that:
Willoughby flew to X Corps headquarters in Korea to interrogate sixteen Chinese prisoners captured by X Corps between 26 and 29 October 1950. This allowed Willoughby to identify their regiment, but he remained skeptical about the number of Chinese troops were in Korea. Not until 5 November did he concede that there were substantial Chinese forces in Korea, and that they were capable of conducting large-scale operations. Willoughby did not rely on any single source, but attempted to verify information with reports from multiple sources. In this case, communications intelligence and imagery intelligence from aerial photography could not confirm the reports coming from human intelligence. The Chinese were aware of American use of these sources, and tried to neutralize them with countermeasures such as camouflage, troop movements by night over mountain roads, and radio silence.
MacArthur was relieved of his command on 11 April 1951 and replaced by Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway. Willoughby remained as G-2 of FECOM. Although Ridgway wanted him to stay on Willoughby asked to return to the United States in June. He explained to the Director of Central Intelligence, Walter B. Smith, that this was motivated by a case of arthritis of the spine. The 3,175th and final issue of the Daily Intelligence Summary was dedicated to him. Willoughby officially retired from the Army on 1 September 1951.
Retirement, death and legacy
thumb|right|Grave in [[Arlington National Cemetery ]]
In January 1953 he was interviewed by Henry Hazlitt and William Bradford Huie for an episode of CBS's Longines Chronoscope talk show, when he advocated friendly ties between America and Franco's Spain, contrasting the Christian anti-communist Franco with communist atheists. This, he argued, would help strengthen the Southern flank of NATO.
Soon after he retired from the Army, Willoughby became the editor of the Foreign Intelligence Digest, a position he held until 1961. In addition, he wrote articles for The American Mercury. He worked with Texas oil tycoon H. L. Hunt on the International Committee for the Defence of Christian Culture, an extreme right organization that had connections to anti-communist groups, and was the organization's national executive secretary for a time. Willoughby was a member of the board of directors for the National Economic Council, a far-right antisemitic group that opposed the civil rights movement and linked it to communism. He was also a member of the American Security Council, an anti-communist organization founded in 1955, whose "Cold War Victory Advisory Committee" he served on. In addition, he was on the National Advisory Board of Young Americans for Freedom. In 1962 he sat on the "Co-ordination of Conservative Efforts" committee of Billy James Hargis' Anti-Communist Liaison organization.
MacArthur affectionately referred to him as "my pet fascist." Willoughby's "vitriolic, paranoid, and frequently fantastic" notes included antisemitic insults towards Beate Sirota Gordon, who helped write the Constitution of Japan. During World War II MacArthur said, "There have been three great intelligence officers in history. Mine is not one of them." John Ferris, in his 2007 book Intelligence and Strategy, calls this an "understatement" and calls Willoughby a "candidate for one of the three worst intelligence officers of the Second World War" (p. 261).
Willoughby began writing a book about the work of the G-2 section during World War II, but his publisher, McGraw-Hill, wanted a biography of MacArthur, as it was felt that this would sell well. To turn it into a biography, Willoughby enlisted the help of Chamberlin as co-author. MacArthur, 1941–1951: Victory in the Pacific was published in 1954. The book was well-received. The military editor of The New York Times, Hanson W. Baldwin, wrote in The New York Times Book Review: Willoughby died on 25 October 1972 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on 2 November. He was inducted into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 1988. His papers are held by Gettysburg College, donated by his wife and Sebald, the executor of his will.
Dates of rank
{| class="wikitable" style="background:white"
|-
| 26px|center
| Enlisted, United States Army: 10 October 1910; Discharged as Sergeant: 9 October 1913
|-
| 13px|center
| Second lieutenant, Infantry: 27 November 1916
|-
| 13px|center
| First lieutenant, Infantry: 27 November 1916
|-
| 33px|center
| Captain, Infantry: 30 June 1917
|-
| 40px|center
| Major, Infantry: 6 March 1928
|-
| 40px|center
| Lieutenant colonel, Infantry: 1 June 1938
|-
| 60px|center
| Colonel, Army of the United States: 14 October 1941
|-
| 33px|center
| Brigadier general, Army of the United States: 20 June 1942
|-
| 66px|center
| Major general, Army of the United States: 17 March 1945
(Terminated 31 May 1946)
|-
| 60px|center
| Colonel, Infantry: 1 September 1945
|-
| 33px|center
| Brigadier general, Army of the United States: 31 May 1946
(Date of rank 20 June 1942)
|-
| 33px|center
| Brigadier general, United States Army: 24 January 1948
|-
| 66px|center
| Major general, Army of the United States: 24 January 1948
|-
| 66px|center
| Major general, Retired List: 1 September 1951
|-
|}
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