American Caesar

by William Manchester

  Before Dai Nippon could be reformed, defeated officers accused of war crimes had to be tried before military tribunals, and there is little about the Japanese which is more enigmatic than their failure to resent the verdicts against Masaharu Homma and Tomoyuki Yamashita. To be sure, the evidence of wartime atrocities was indisputable. Individual soldiers under Homma and Yamashita had behaved barbarously. But their outrages had not been committed on instructions from their commanders. There was no parallel with Germany, where the head of state and the entire apparatus of government had connived in torture and mass murder. Furthermore, “the Germans,” as MacArthur himself pointed out, “should have known better. They were traitors to western culture.” The Japanese, on the other hand, were following holocaustic precedents which went back to Genghis Khan.56

  In the early months of the occupation, 1,128 Nipponese, from former Prime Ministers Hideki Tojo and Koki Hirota to POW guards and Tokyo Rose, were incarcerated in Tokyo’s squat Sugamo Prison. The Potsdam proclamation had directed that “stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties on our prisoners.” An eleven-judge tribunal chaired by Australia’s Sir William Webb was instructed “to try and punish Far Eastern war criminals who . . . are charged with offenses which include Crimes against Peace.” In the Japanese War Ministry, on the outskirts of the capital, court stenographers took 48,412 pages of testimony from 1,198 witnesses. In the end 174 men were sentenced to death. Later this list was pared to seven, including Tojo and Hirota. MacArthur had the power to commute their sentences. He declined to exercise it, telling Sebald afterward, in a husky whisper, “Bill, that was a difficult decision to make.” The General barred photographers from the executions but instructed each Allied power to send a representative. Unrepentant, the seven condemned men mounted the scaffold shouting, “Banzai!”57

  Most of the other defendants, together with some 210,000 minor wartime functionaries, were simply “purged,” that is, forbidden to reenter public life under SCAP Order No. 550, which informed the Japanese government that it must “remove and exclude from public office all persons who in one capacity or another” had been “influential in promoting militarism.” MacArthur wrote that he was “pleasantly surprised at the attitude of the Japanese people during the period of trial. They seemed to be impressed both by the fairness of the procedures and by the lack of vindictiveness on the part of the prosecutors. The prisoners themselves and their families made it a point to write letters to me and to the tribunal after their conviction to express thanks for our impartiality and justice. No perceptible ill will was generated in Japan as a result of the trials.” Yoshio Suzuki, the Nipponese foreign minister, pointed out to his countrymen that German jails were crowded with Nazis who had been fined, sentenced to menial labor, and deprived of their property while “in our country . . . those who precipitated the nation into war are only barred from office, which, we must explicitly bear in mind, is due to General MacArthur’s generous occupation policy.”58

  That was one side of the coin. The other, darker, side, which Suzuki tactfully ignored, was that Homma and Yamashita—MacArthur’s chief adversaries—were tried and convicted by kangaroo courts which flouted justice with the Supreme Commander’s approval and probably at his urging. The courts-martial were held in the ornate reception hall of Manila’s high commissioner’s residence, under the eyes of Filipinos still enraged by the savaging of their capital. The tribunals consisted, not of lawyers, but of regular army officers who were answerable to the five-star general in Tokyo. They could have been under no illusions about what he wanted them to do. He had drawn up the charges. He repeatedly goaded them to move swiftly. And he had established the rules of evidence, such as they were. The court determined the credibility of witnesses. Hearsay, double hearsay, and even triple hearsay based on conjecture were admissible as proof; so was extremely prejudicial material. Cross-examination was aborted, or omitted entirely, at the whim of the presiding officer. When defense attorneys tried to discuss SCAP directives governing the proceedings, they were reprimanded and forbidden to mention MacArthur’s name in the courtroom.59

  After the Yamashita verdict was in, Newsweek commented: “In the opinion of probably every correspondent covering the trial, the military commission came into the courtroom the first day with the decision already in its collective pocket.” The twelve reporters who heard all the testimony polled one another and found for the defendant, 12 to o. Some idea of what passed for evidence may be inferred from a motion picture, a fake documentary, which was shown by the tribunal. A GI was depicted as bending over the body of a dead Japanese soldier, slowly drawing a piece of paper from his pocket, and reading it as a narrator’s voice intoned: “Orders from Tokyo. We have discovered the secret orders to destroy Manila.” There was no explanation of how the GI could read Japanese. In bitter understatement, one defense counsel said of this shoddy film that it was “not at all conducive to the calm, dispassionate sifting of the facts which has always been the cornerstone of American justice. ” Another said that “no American who loves his country can read the record of the prosecution’s efforts in this respect without an abiding and painful sense of shame.” 60

  It is too much to say of Homma, as H. L. Mencken did, that MacArthur slew “the man who beat him in a fair fight on Bataan.” There was nothing fair about either the Japanese conquest of Luzon or the American reconquest of it; war is never evenhanded. But no hard evidence linked Homma with the Death March of 1942. At most he was an ineffectual commander, unable to control the brutality of his men. Both he and Yamashita were found guilty on the ground that they had held “command responsibility,” but if they were thus accountable, so was their emperor. Indeed, Webb held that Japan’s ruler could not be relieved “from responsibility for the events for which the defendants were convicted.” He reasoned that Hirohito’s “authority was required for the war. If he did not want war he should have withheld his authority. It is no answer to say he might have been assassinated. That risk is taken by all rulers, who must still do their duty.” Then, backing away from his own argument, Sir William said he did not want the emperor sent to the gallows; he agreed that extending immunity to him was “in the best interests of the allied powers.” That can hardly be contested, but it is difficult to understand why, if Hirohito was to be spared, his generals should have to die. The London Daily Express’s Manila correspondent cabled home: “The trial is supposed to establish that a military commander is responsible for any acts of any of his troops. At the same time, under British law, anyway, he’s supposed to have rights. . . . So far Yamashita’s American counsel haven’t had a hearing.”61

  MacArthur appears to have regarded Yamashita as the guiltier of the two commanders. Passing final judgment on Homma was, he said, a “repugnant duty.” He received Mrs. Homma in the Dai Ichi, allowing her to plead for clemency—“It was one of the most trying hours of my life”—and though he denied her request, he ordered that her husband be shot rather than sent to the more dishonorable scaffold. By contrast, he seems to have relished the end of Yamashita, ordering that before his hanging he be “stripped of uniform, decorations and other appurtenances signifying membership in the military profession.” Yet one U.S. Supreme Court justice suggested that “Homma’s guilt under the law of war is more direct and clear than in the case of General Yamashita,” and the 423 exhibits in the Yamashita case and the trial transcript, which exceeds four thousand pages, expose a clear miscarriage of justice. To the end of his life MacArthur insisted that the verdict had been “above challenge,” that there had been no “mitigating circumstances,” and that his American critics either favored “arbitrariness of process above factual realism” or shrank from “the stern rigidity of capital punishment.” None of this survives scrutiny. The truth is that the prosecution had no case at all.62

  During the pretrial interrogation of Yamashita a team of American psychiatrists reported: “The general appears more as a benign, aging Japanese o
fficer than the formidable ‘Tiger of Malaya.’ He was, throughout the interview, alert, interested, courteous, and cooperative. One was, against one’s will or better judgment, inclined to credit him as being sincere in his answers.” Why physicians conducting an objective interview should reach conclusions against their will or better judgment is unclear, but by most accounts, including theirs, Yamashita was an extraordinary man, by far the more interesting of the two major defendants in Manila, a forceful, brilliant commander who had been Japan’s ablest tactician. Outnumbered better than three to one, he had nevertheless defeated the British defenders of Malaya in the tenth week of the war; Churchill had admitted to a secret session of the House of Commons that “Singapore, with a force of 100,000 men, surrendered to 30,000 Japanese.” After that, he had been transferred to inactive fronts because his popularity threatened to match Tojo’s and because, ironically, Yamashita opposed the militarist clique in Tokyo and believed its war policy was doomed. He hadn’t been returned onstage until MacArthur’s 1944 drive had reached the threshold of Leyte, and one of his first orders to Japanese troops in the Philippines then had been to “handle the Filipinos carefully, to cooperate with them.”

  Yet MacArthur charged him with Philippine atrocities committed in September 1944, when Yamashita had been stationed in Manchuria, thousands of miles away. His chief crime, according to the Supreme Commander, had been the “callous and purposeless . . . sack of the ancient city of Manila, with its Christian population and its countless historic shrines and monuments of culture and civilization.” Actually, as Yamashita testified, he had declared the Philippine capital an open city for three reasons: he couldn’t feed its million inhabitants, the buildings were highly inflammable, and the flat land surrounding the city made defending it strategically unsound. Accordingly, he had withdrawn his soldiers and established new headquarters in Baguio, 150 miles away. On February 3, 1945, GIs had entered the northern outskirts of Manila. Not until nine days later did Yamashita learn that Japanese sailors and marines—troops he had never trained, inspected, or even seen—were still in the capital. He had promptly radioed their commander, Admiral Iwabuchi, now dead, ordering him to withdraw from the city immediately “in accordance with our original plan.” Japanese communications were so poor that the general didn’t learn of their atrocities until long afterward. At his trial he testified: “I positively and categorically affirm that they were against my wishes and in direct contradiction to all my expressed orders, and, further . . . they occurred at a place and a time of which I had no knowledge whatsoever.”

  His American judges didn’t believe him. Neither did MacArthur. President Truman refused to intervene. The New York Times denied that the death sentence had been “imposed haphazardly in thoughtless haste,” and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the verdicts 7 to 2. Yet the Court dissents by Frank Murphy and Wiley B. Rutledge were both vehement and persuasive. Rutledge said the proceedings had been “no trial in the tradition of the common law and the Constitution.” Murphy wrote that the “spirit of revenge and retribution, masked in formal legal procedure for purposes of dealing with a fallen enemy commander, can do more lasting harm than all of the atrocities giving rise to that spirit.” The two judges called the Manila verdicts “legalized lynching.” Murphy concluded: “Today the lives of Yamashita and Homma, leaders of enemy forces vanquished on the field of battle, are taken without regard to the due process of law.” Wainwright asked that Yamashita be given “fair treatment” and “every right due him under the Geneva Convention,” and Merlo J. Pusey observed that the “disquieting” and “really significant” aspect of the military tribunals was that the responsibility for maintaining civil liberties had passed from the courts to the army: “In the face of the performance to date, it would be pretty difficult to show that we have come through the war with our constitutional liberties unimpaired.” Yamashita’s “real crime,” in the opinion of A. Frank Reel, who defended him, “was that he was on the losing side.”63

  Once MacArthur had decided to put the two enemy generals to death, his wisest course would have been to issue a crisp order and then turn to other matters. But that wasn’t his way. To him warfare would always be tinged with the romantic tones of Arthurian legend, with the magic nimbus of the Round Table, and he believed that Shinto, Bushido, and the samurai code were Oriental extensions of it. In his view, therefore, these two Japanese commanders had betrayed, not just Dai Nippon, nor even Manila’s violated Filipinos, but MacArthur’s own profession. Thus he drew up long bombastic statements denouncing the men whose lives he was about to take. Homma, he said, had violated “a fundamental code of chivalry, which has ruled all honorable military men throughout the ages in treatment of defeated opponents.” Expatiating at greater length on the Yamashita verdict, he wrote, “Rarely has so cruel and wanton a record been spread to public gaze. . . . The soldier, be he friend or foe, is charged with the protection of the weak and unarmed. It is the very essence and reason for his being. When he violates his sacred trust, he not only profanes his entire cult but threatens the very fabric of international society. . . . This officer, of proven field merit, entrusted with high command involving authority adequate to responsibility, has failed this irrevocable standard; has failed his duty to his troops, to his country, to his enemy, to mankind; has failed utterly his soldier faith. The transgressions resulting therefrom as revealed by the trial are a blot, . . . a stain upon civilization and constitute a memory of shame and dishonor that can never be forgotten.”64

  At 3:00 A.M. on February 23, 1946, the trap was sprung beneath Yamashita in Los Baños, a town about thirty-five miles south of Manila. His last words were, “I will pray for the Emperor’s long life and his prosperity forever!” Eight days later Homma’s body was riddled by a firing squad in the same courtyard. Both men were calm and stoical at the end, and had they worn the uniform of another country, they might have been revered as martyrs. Partly because MacArthur’s occupation of their homeland was such a success, the two generals were quickly forgotten. So, mercifully, were the Supreme Commander’s final words in denunciation of them. Nothing he had written in his refusal to stay their executions bore any relationship to the two men as they actually were. He had, however, said a great deal about both the bright and the shadowy places in the character of Douglas MacArthur.65

  Just as water piles up behind a ship’s keel in a typhoon, baffling the screws and forcing helmsmen to violate every principle of seamanship to avoid broaching to, so national anguish foils the human mechanism. In times of social upheaval dazed populations turn to the irrational, the bizarre, the macabre. Laws of social gravity are suspended. People take up wild crazes, behave like freaks, laugh at horror, weep at wit. One of the surest signs of this psychedelic mood is popular music. Nonsense songs catch on, perhaps because sensible lyrics mock a demented world. John Reed heard such ditties hummed in Russia on the eve of the October Revolution; so did Christopher Isherwood in Weimar Berlin; a British band played “The World Turned Upside Down” at Yorktown; and Americans, during the throes of the Great Depression and World War II, sang “The Music Goes Round and Round,’ “Three Itty Fishes,” “Hut Sut Song,” and “Mairzy Doats.”66

  It happened thus in postwar Japan. Shortly after the capitulation on the Missouri, Tokyo Rose was replaced by “Tokyo Mose,” a nisei whose broadcasts were beamed across the land by the armed forces network. At the same time, a U.S. journalist composed an odd verse of phrases which seemed to be spoken by the Japanese with astonishing frequency. Tokyo Mose crooned it over the radio to the tune of “London Bridge Is Falling Down”:

  Moshi, moshi, anonay?

  Anonay? Anonay?

  Moshi, moshi! Anonay?

  Ah, so deska!

  Roughly translated, this meant, “Hello, hello, are you there? Are you there, are you there? Hello, hello, are you there? Ah, is that so!” MacArthur’s troops liked it; it seemed to sum up their amiable bewilderment in this strange country. And the Japanese accepted it enthusiastical
ly. During that first postwar winter it was heard everywhere, until some people, both the occupiers and the occupied, cringed when they heard its first notes. One reason for its popularity among the Nipponese was that it pleased the American army, and they wished to be hospitable. Another reason may have been its repeated question, for Hirohito’s stunned subjects really didn’t know where they were or what had happened to the institutions they had been taught to cherish, particularly the imperial system.67

  If there was one fixed star in the Shinto constellation, it was the sanctity of the tennõ, the “emperor of heaven.” Situated at the center of the nation, he was immovable, untouchable, a sacred being who never visited anyone except the council of Shinto gods. Even after the surrender, die-hard samurai were predicting to Hirohito’s benumbed subjects that he would soon call for a return to fukko, antiquity, or even broadcast the slogan “sonnô-jõi,” “Revere the Emperor! Drive out the barbarians!” Then they picked up their newspapers on September 28, 1945, and beheld a photograph of their little sovereign standing beside Douglas MacArthur. He had called on the General, top hat in hand. Some Japanese thought the picture had been faked, and some, for a few dangerous hours, believed that Hirohito must have been prodded into the American embassy at bayonet point, but the visit had been the emperor’s idea. As MacArthur had foreseen, curiosity or an appreciation of his country’s new realities had prompted Hirohito to make the move. According to Larry Bunker, the first inkling of it came when Nippon’s foreign minister, Shigeru Yoshida, had crossed the moat the previous morning, ridden up to the sixth floor, and informed the General’s staff that his sovereign wished to talk to the Supreme Commander. MacArthur sent back word that he had no intention of setting foot in the palace; his position wouldn’t permit it. At the same time, he realized that expecting Hirohito to call on his conqueror at the Dai Ichi, a public building, would be needlessly mortifying. Therefore he would receive him at the embassy. The emperor could be accompanied by an interpreter. One picture would be taken. Then they would talk for half an hour.68