The soldiers’ mood reached the breaking point in December. The spark was the cancellation of a transport ship anchored in Manila. News of the cancellation spread like wildfire and on Christmas Day, 4,000 men marched on military headquarters, carrying banners. One banner even compared Patterson to the Japanese commander and war criminal, Tomoyuki Yamashita, because they both claimed to “know nothing” of what their soldiers were doing.
Over the next three weeks, the mutinous mood gained momentum. Soldiers in the army mailrooms in Manila and Tokyo made rubber stamps with the words “No Boats, No Votes” and made sure the slogan was stamped on all outgoing letters.
In Frankfurt, soldiers marched on the headquarters of the commander of U.S. troops in Europe, General Joseph McNarney, chanting, “We want to go home!” They were blocked by armed MP’s. Soldiers jeered, “He’s too scared to face us.”
In France U.S. soldiers marched down the Champs Elysées waving magnesium flares and chanting “We want to go home.” Another 400 assembled at the Trocadero across from the Eiffel Tower.
In London, 500 U.S. troops marched to Claridge’s Hotel, where they asked to see Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in London on a goodwill mission. She met with a delegation and wrote to then-Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower the next day, saying that the soldiers’ dissatisfaction was due to uncertainty and boredom. “They are good boys, but if they don't have enough to do, they'll get in trouble. That is the nature of boys, I'm afraid…”
Communists help spread the discontent
The subject of troops’ low morale became a subject of newspaper editorials and articles. Someone who must have been pleased was Erwin Marquit. A lifelong Marxist and a U.S. Communist Party member from a young age, he’d joined the Navy in 1945. Marquit’s detailed, personal memoir, “The Demobilization Movement of January 1946” (Nature Society and Thought, 2002), recounts with pride and in detail how “the Communists and those allied with them helped guide this GI outburst into a powerful, well-organized movement.”
In Marquit’s eyes, any slowdown of the demobilization could only be due to the imperialistic aims of the capitalist Western powers. As Party members, their goal was to resist “the overtly imperialist ambitions latent in the new U.S. role in the postwar world.”
Major John Sparrow, in his even-handed “History of Personnel Demobilization in the United States Army,” published in 1950, acknowledges the Party’s influence on events and its destructive effect on soldiers’ and civilians’ morale. While neither Sparrow nor Lee felt that the CPUSA actions created the discontent, they agreed that they amplified and spread it.
As more and more soldiers boarded ships home, the “mutiny” faded. By March, it was a distant memory. As President Truman had presciently noted in a news conference on August 23, 1945, “It wouldn't make any difference what sort of [demobilization] plan [we] had, somebody wouldn't like it.”