Flyboys

by James Bradley

  Instead of investigating the emperor as he was ordered, General MacArthur forbade it. In a secret cable he assured Washington: “Investigation has been conducted. . . . and no evidence has been found that connected Hirohito to political decisions during the past decade.” And chief prosecutor Joseph Keenan informed his prosecutors that they were not to go after the emperor. Any evidence that led to the top would be suppressed, and if they would not assist in the cover-up, they should “by all means go home immediately.” Rather than serve to prosecute justice, “the prosecution functioned, in effect, as a defense team for the emperor.”

  Former Prime Minister Tojo and twenty-seven other military and government officers were charged as Class A war criminals. The main charge was that they were part of a “conspiracy” to “wage wars of aggression, and wars in violation of international law.”

  A law passed after the occurrence of an event that retrospectively changes the legal consequences of the event is called an ex post facto law. The United States Constitution has two clauses prohibiting ex post facto laws. But the charge of “waging aggressive war” was a charge invented by the victors after World War II. U.S. Brigadier General Elliott Thorpe was one who shared the job of choosing which war criminals would be tried. “I still don’t believe that was the right thing to do,” Thorpe later said. “I still believe that it was an ex post facto law. They made up the rules after the game was over.” Thorpe thought the trials were not about justice but revenge. “We wanted blood and, by God, we had blood,” Thorpe said. And General William Chase wrote, “We used to say in Tokyo that the U.S. had better not lose the next war, or our generals and admirals would all be shot at sunrise without a hearing of any sort.”

  Prosecutor Keenan tried to make the case that the inept Spirit Warriors, the guys who in reality had stumbled from event to event, were actually master conspirators who worked their evil over a fourteen-year period, from 1928 to 1945, hiding it from their boss. But the name of the only official who held power throughout those fourteen years was never mentioned. It was like making the case that the Model T automobile sprang from workers’ coffee breaks and Mr. Ford just happened to have a big office.

  Chief Judge William Webb of Australia later criticized the fact that the “leader of the crime, though available for trial, had been granted immunity.” Judge Henri Bernard of France wrote that Japan’s crimes “had a principal author who escaped all prosecution and of whom in any case the present Defendants could only be considered as accomplices.” Former Prime Minister Tojo was happy that “nothing was carried up to the emperor and on that point I am being comforted.” On the day the Class A conspirators were sentenced, prosecutor Keenan enjoyed a three-hour lunch with Emperor Hirohito at the palace.

  Seven Class A prisoners were hanged, including Tojo. Six others died in prison and two were released insane. Thirteen were later paroled, serving at the most eight years for crimes against millions of people.

  But in many cases, it seemed the bigger the crime, the more likely the criminal was to get off scot-free. Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, the “God of Strategy” who planned the southern advance, had Chinese heads displayed in Singapore, and inspired Major Matoba with his habit of eating enemy livers, was one who escaped prosecution. Douglas MacArthur’s intelligence chief, General Charles Willoughby, had damning evidence that Colonel Tsuji had beheaded Flyboy Lieutenant Benjamin Parker and eaten his liver. But Willoughby was concerned about the spread of Communism in postwar Japan and “Tsuji’s anti-communist bona fides, together with his renowned planning skills, made him a valuable property for postwar Japan; and one thus worth protecting.” Tsuji not only avoided prosecution but was later elected to the lower house of the Japanese Diet.

  Perhaps Japan’s most egregious war crime was the biological and chemical warfare waged in China by Unit 731. General MacArthur and a number of other American officers knew that Unit 731 had experimented upon and killed captured American POWs. But when the diabolical doctors offered the U.S. valuable information based on their gruesome experiments in exchange for immunity, MacArthur immediately approved this devil’s deal.

  In 1979, fourteen Class A criminals were secretly enshrined as patriotic “martyrs” in Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead. Among those enshrined were Tojo and General Iwane Matsui, whose troops were responsible for the Rape of Nanking.

  Today many complain that Japan has not taken full responsibility for its involvement in World War II. But by letting the chief culprit off, by contorting justice with ex post facto laws, and by hiding some of Japan’s most horrific crimes, the Allies rendered justice arbitrary and made a mockery of any attempt to fix historical blame. If Hitler had been coddled and defended by the American conquerors, would the average German be expected to reflect upon his guilt?

  Lieutenant Bill Doran had just graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946 when he was ordered to observe the Guam War Crimes trials of the Chichi Jima accused. This trial was one of hundreds that took place throughout the Pacific. It was conducted under conditions of extreme secrecy in a “humungous” metal Quonset building.

  “The Japanese prisoners sat at a long table,” Bill recalled. “There was a huge Marine standing behind each prisoner. Each Marine carried the weapon of his choice, magnums, semi-automatics, shoulder holsters, pearl-handled thirty-eight specials. Plus, all the Marines carried big ebony clubs, three times the size of regular policemen’s billy clubs. Each Marine was at ‘parade rest,’ with his back to crowd, legs apart. They had their left hand on the chair of each prisoner, and the club in their right hand behind their back. Once in a while the portable electrical generator would cut out. When it did, the interior of the hut went completely pitch-dark. When this happened, the Marines would instantly move their left hand from the back of the prisoner’s chair to the back of his neck. And they would bend over the prisoner and put the club just over the prisoner’s head. We would see this scene briefly when the lights went back on.”

  Fourteen Japanese officers, soldiers, and doctors were tried as Class B criminals by a military commission on Guam. Eight American military officers from various services sat as judges. American and Japanese civilian lawyers served as defense counsel. Class B crimes included murder, ill treatment of prisoners, failure to give an honorable burial, and failure to control the unlawful behavior of subordinates. The navy searched for past instances of war criminals being charged with cannibalism, but no one at The Hague or Geneva had ever anticipated the need to criminalize the eating of the enemy. The charge of “failure to give an honorable burial” was substituted.

  Bill Doran, who spent his life as a lawyer, told me many years later: “I’ve read thousands of trial transcripts. All war crimes trials have people accusing one side of doing something, the other side denying it, and then courts make a decision. Here, you have all the testimony coming from one side, all the witnesses are Japanese themselves. The Japanese are admitting that they were cannibals, in their own words.”

  In his opening statement, prosecutor Daniel Flynn warned that some of the alleged “acts are so revolting to the human mind that man long ago decided it unnecessary to legislate directly against their commission. [The charges] rank with the most startling ever to be heard in the criminal court. It is our hope that never again will the like of these cases have to be presented.” Prosecutor Fredric Suss called the accused “inhuman savages . . . who have torn and mutilated the bodies of our defenseless brothers in the most primitive and barbaric fashion.” He suggested that the Chichi Jima soldiers were “typical representatives of this diabolical evil force . . . the ambitious Japanese military that infected their country like a dangerous disease and spread with cruelty as the deadly plague over Asia and the Pacific.”

  “But the information about the Americans having their heads chopped off and livers taken out wasn’t supposed to get back to the United States,” Bill said. “The Marine guards told me the navy didn’t want people back home to know that their sons were eaten.�
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  The prosecution called forty-three witnesses. Major Horie, in khaki shorts, was the star witness. Behind the scenes, General Tachibana called Horie “an American dog.” “You are not Japanese,” the general told him.

  “The navy kept the Japanese prisoners all together in a big penned area,” Bill said. “Inside were barracks. The pen was made of heavy wire mesh. One night, Matoba tore a hole in that fence, big enough to get his head through. The guards caught him the next morning. None of the Marine guards could rip the material the slightest bit.”

  General Tachibana denied everything. He said he didn’t know about the killing of any flyers and that he never ate human flesh. And at first, Major Matoba tried to pass blame off on underlings, though he finally came clean. He dispelled the idea that the cannibalism occurred because of hunger. “My battalion still had sufficient food,” he said.

  “Yes [I am a cannibal],” Major Matoba testified. “I was a madman due to the war and that is the only reason I can give for being a cannibal.”

  Captain Yoshii, who ordered the deaths of Jimmy Dye and Warren Earl Vaughn, refused to answer questions. Instead, he submitted a statement noting, “Not one war criminal has been found among the victorious nations.” He wrote that the “War Crimes Trials are [an] emotional act of revenge against the defeated nations.” Yoshii instructed his interrogators: “Do not judge the guilty, before you have judged yourself. Therefore, before you charge anybody, charge yourself first.” He quoted the Book of Saint Matthew: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For that judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

  Yoshii refused to testify until the commission answered how they, as Christians, could answer why he was being judged and no Allied war criminals were. The mistreatment of POWs was a perfect example. There was no doubt that Japan had perpetrated an enormous crime. Japan had held 132,134 western POWs and 35,756 of them died in detention, a death rate of 27 percent. In contrast, only 4 percent of the POWs held by the Germans and Italians died. “Moreover, the postwar death rate among surviving POWs of the Japanese was also higher.”

  But one of the judges at the Tokyo war crimes trial was from the Soviet Union. America’s ally still held up to 700,000 Japanese prisoners captured in Manchuria. As the Tokyo trial wore on and a Soviet sat in judgment over Japanese, their countrymen were being worked to death in Soviet prison camps. More than 62,000 Japanese POWs—almost twice as many as Allied POW deaths—would die in the gulag.

  Captain Yoshii never addressed the commission.

  General Tachibana, Major Matoba, and Captain Yoshii were high-ranking officers who ordered Flyboys’ deaths. It was easy to assign them guilt. The lower-ranking Japanese soldiers who had been ordered to serve as executioners assumed that the blame would stop at the officer level and not reach them. After all, Japanese soldiers had to follow orders. But they were shocked to learn that for the purposes of the trial, they would be retroactively transferred to an ethical sphere they never could have imagined. These soldiers were informed that they had been individuals on Chichi Jima who had exercised free will. And to their astonishment, the soldiers learned that they had been responsible for their actions and superior orders were no excuse.

  The interpreters must have had a difficult time conveying these foreign concepts to the shinmin—“people who obediently comply with their orders.” Rights? Free will? The responsibility to disobey? And what exactly was an illegal order? These soldiers had operated in a moral universe where it was illegal to disobey a superior’s order. The backbone of the Japanese military was obedience. These soldiers were not citizens; they had no rights. They were Hirohito’s issen gorin.

  Private Matsutano Kido was one of four soldiers ordered to stab Dick Woellhof. His defense counsel noted, “Private Kido was an uneducated man who received an order. He obeys that order and a year later finds himself charged with violation of the laws and customs of war. . . . What does Kido know about the laws and customs of war? Kido can barely read and write—yet now he is supposed to know all about International Law and proper treatment of prisoners and the Geneva and Hague conventions.”

  But despite such pleadings, the prosecution maintained that the Geneva convention held sway on Chichi Jima. Hirohito might be protected, but not these men.

  The Japanese defendants were thus held to a different standard than U.S. troops would have been in the same situation. Army chief of staff George Marshall had decreed that when an accused American’s acts “were done pursuant to order of a superior or government sanction [such a superior order] may be taken into consideration in determining culpability.” So an American serviceman could use superior orders as a defense. But at the Guam trials, the prosecution decreed that Japanese soldiers could not: “Superior orders . . . are no defense to the commission of crime, for a man is not obliged to obey an unlawful order.”

  Sergeant Takano was another who had bayoneted Dick Woellhof. He was shocked to learn that he bore responsibility for carrying out an order. “I cannot understand how my superior officers on Chichi Jima could make it possible for me to be accused of murder because they ordered me to carry out their orders,” Takano testified. “I had no will to kill any prisoner. . . . I blindly carried out an order with only the idea that to do so is the right thing. I trust implicitly my superior officers and never for one moment doubted but that their orders were to be carried out.”

  Arguing that the Japanese soldiers’ lot was “little better than [that of] slaves,” defense counsel said, “It is a crime against humanity to lay responsibility upon those whose acts are limited by their superiors. It is cruel to condemn those to heavy punishment who do not know the law.” Major Horie testified, “The fundamental basis for the Army is absolute obedience to any order—unquestioning obedience.” And Captain Masao Yamashita, who carried out the order to kill Grady York, told the commission: “I was educated since I was young to give absolute obedience to orders. I carried it out much against my will as I did not have any other alternative.” Private Taniyama, another who had speared Dick Woellhof, said, “We did not have any freedom at all to judge the right or wrong of given orders. We were all puppets who have been deprived of our own will and freedom.” Corporal Nakamura, who had reluctantly chopped Floyd Hall’s head off, said, “The order was given on the front line of battle. I knew that to refuse such an order meant sure death.” Lieutenant Hayashi, who sliced Jimmy Dye, reminded the commission of the “seriousness of the crime of disobedience” in the Japanese military. And Colonel Kato, who had ordered Grady York’s death and accepted full responsibility, urged the commission to “understand the position of absolute obedience” in which the executioners had found themselves: “I plead that you fully understand that their actions were not committed by them of their own free will.”

  A voice from the grave supported this claim. Ensign Takao Koyama, who had chopped off Warren Earl Vaughn’s head, had committed suicide over his guilt. He left a note. In it he wrote, “I now say my actions were wrong [but] I believe I have done right as a military man [because] the carrying out of orders from superior officers was more important than death.”

  The defense recalled the extraordinary time in which the executions occurred, with daily air raids and the fear of an American invasion, when “obedience to orders was most rigidly required.” One defendant said, “During a period of war an order is something more absolute than any moral obligation.” A defense lawyer pointed out that “orders under the grueling, pounding stress of battle assume a far different aspect than they do in peaceful surroundings on a quiet military installation.” He said that to expect a Japanese soldier “to refuse to obey such an order is to be entirely ignorant of the Japanese mind and temperament.” Another defense lawyer put it in terms the American commission members could understand. He maintained that “if a comparable order had been given by a M
arine Corps major to a Marine Corps first lieutenant to take a firing squad and shoot a Jap prisoner on Iwo Jima at the same time that these events took place on Chichi Jima—the first lieutenant would not have hesitated any longer nor protested any more than [the Japanese] did.”

  In September of 1947, five Spirit Warriors—General Tachibana, Major Matoba, Colonel Ito, Captain Yoshii, and Captain Nakajima—were hanged and buried in unmarked graves on Guam. Most of the other accused were sentenced to prison terms and served their time in Tokyo’s Sugamo prison.

  Newspapers in Japan and America reported snippets of the trial and the hangings. The news accounts were sensational but short on detail. Time magazine’s headline was “Unthinkable Crime.” The New York Times referred to the proceedings as the “CANNIBALISM TRIAL.” The trial of former Prime Minister Tojo and the other Class A criminals dominated the news, and the Guam trials were relegated to the inside pages. The names of the Chichi Jima Flyboys were never mentioned.

  Almost two hundred war crimes trials took place throughout Asia after World War II. The trials were held in many countries and jurisdictions, and there is no accurate tabulation of the final results. But as far as can be determined, approximately 5,700 Japanese were indicted for war crimes. About 920 were executed, 525 received life sentences, 2,944 were sentenced to more limited prison terms, 1,018 were acquitted, and 279 were never brought to trial. No Americans were tried.