Tears in the Darkness

by Michael Norman

  In the fourteen years between 1931 and 1945, fifty million people—soldiers and civilians, belligerents and innocents—had lost their lives to war. Much of the world was in ruin, and tens of millions were homeless and adrift. As the Allies saw it, the war had been a criminal act, an assault on civilization, and they meant to make sure that the malefactors responsible for this misery answered for their acts.

  The bill of particulars against the Japanese was long and unsettling. Murder, rape, torture—Nanking, Singapore, Hong Kong. More than twenty-four million men, women, and children had died in the fighting in Asia. Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, Malayans, Thais, Burmese, Indians, Japanese. Crimes against peace. Crimes against humanity.

  The victors wanted vengeance, a coda to the killing, an epilogue to all the loss. On August 28, 1945, two weeks after Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender, the War Crimes Office of the War Department cabled General MacArthur (now supreme commander of the Allied Powers and in effect the military governor of Japan) a list of suspected Japanese war criminals and invited him to add his own warrants. Officials in Washington and on MacArthur’s staff in Tokyo envisioned thousands of prosecutions, but for the moment they were after forty of the most notorious malefactors.

  Number one on the list was Japan’s political panjandrum, Hideki Tojo, war minister and prime minister for most of the war. The next nine names were also familiar, right-wing politicians and militarists who had made total war state policy. Then came name number eleven, Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, former commander of the 14th Imperial Army, conqueror of the Philippines.1

  Japanese diplomats were surprised to see Homma’s name on the list, and so was Homma. On September 15, as he was preparing to leave Tokyo for Yokohama to surrender himself to military authorities, he paused to talk with American reporters. The general seemed genuinely ignorant of the charges against him. What was this “march of death” the reporters were talking about? And why were they referring to him in their dispatches as “the Beast of Bataan”?

  From the back benches, the arrest looked like the work of Douglas MacArthur, personal revenge for the defeat MacArthur had suffered four years earlier at Homma’s hands. No doubt the new supreme commander was satisfied to see his old nemesis in custody. Homma, after all, had humiliated him in battle, forced him to flee in the night and abandon his men to the enemy’s tender mercies. But MacArthur was not the author of Homma’s unhappy actualities. That role, in a roundabout way, belonged to a little-known fighter pilot, a tall blond Texan named Ed Dyess.2

  WHEN THE JAPANESE BOMBED Clark Field in December 1941, Captain William E. Dyess of Albany, Texas, was commander of the 21st Pursuit Squadron. After surrender, Dyess made the torturous death march and rode the suffocating trains to Camp O’Donnell. In early November 1942, he was sent with a large draft of prisoners to a work camp at Davao on the southern island of Mindanao. A daring man, Dyess dreamed of escape, and one day in April 1943, he slipped into the jungle with nine confederates and began a long trek that would eventually land him, along with Lieutenant Colonel S. M. Mellnick and Navy Commander Melvyn McCoy, in Australia and then, finally, home.

  Passing through Sydney, the men told their stories to MacArthur and his staff, and later in Washington they repeated the grim details of their capture and confinement for the generals and admirals at the War Department. Mellnick and McCoy had been captured on Corregidor and knew nothing of the march, but Dyess had made the sixty-six-mile trek, and he had lived for months in the doleful O’Donnell.

  Officials in Washington had long suspected that American prisoners of war were being treated cruelly and with wanton neglect. Now, for the first time, the American government had hard evidence of those atrocities, the testimony of Mellnick, McCoy, and Dyess.

  During the fall and early winter of 1943, the Roosevelt administration ordered the three men to keep silent. The Swedish relief ship Gripsholm, a neutral vessel, was still plying the Pacific with repatriated nationals and Red Cross packages for Allied prisoners of war, and the War Department felt that any story of Japanese atrocities might provoke the enemy to refuse the ship and perhaps treat the thousands of men in Japanese hands with even more malice.

  Washington, however, has always been a loquacious city, and a story about a “death march” was hard to keep under wraps. A number of newspapers and magazines pressed the Office of War Information and the Office of Censorship to let them pursue the story. Dyess, in fact, was eager to tell his countrymen about the plight of the comrades he’d left behind, and he had reached an agreement with the Chicago Tribune to serialize his story as soon as the press ban was lifted.

  In December 1943, Ed Dyess was killed during a training flight in California. Now, spurred by Dyess’s wife, Marajen, the Tribune fought the news embargo even harder. Finally, on January 27, 1944, the government lifted the ban, and the Army and War departments issued a long and detailed press release based on the accounts of the three former prisoners of war. Three days later, the Tribune, and one hundred of its affiliated newspapers, published the first part of the Dyess account.

  “THE STORY I am about to tell is true,” Dyess began. And day after day, Ed Dyess gave American newspaper readers another installment.

  These tales of atrocities left Americans enraged. And their anger filled bag after bag in the White House mail room: “Every Jap man, woman and child, even unto the third and forth generation, should be forthwith exterminated” . . . “Why do the stinkin Japs do such lousy things to our boys. Why?”3

  Congress was brimming with vitriol as well. Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri wanted to “hang the Mikado [the emperor] and bomb Japan out of existence,” and Senator Ernest McFarland of Arizona wanted the Japanese to be “lined up and shot and suffer the tortures of hell.”4

  Reporters, knowing his inclination to grandiloquence, went to MacArthur for comment, but the general kept largely silent about the men he’d left behind. “The stories speak for themselves” was all he would say.

  At a press conference on February 1, President Roosevelt was asked whether “the individual Japanese responsible for this crime would be tracked down and ultimately punished.”

  “There is no question about that,” he said.

  [Masaharu Homma, Prison Diary, September 17, 1945] The country has been defeated, and I am here in prison, lamenting my situation. The loss that I could not change.

  We have plumbing, as well as two restrooms. The only thing that I dislike is the fact that there is a lock on the door, and that we are constantly being guarded. Lunch was kidney beans, stewed tomatoes, potatoes, corn, and canned peaches. We also had watery pineapple juice, bread with butter, and 1 box of Camels . . .

  The American army has begun writing many things down in order to record my position on the crime I am accused of committing, the “Death March.” I will take full responsibility for my subordinates’ actions, but I also intend to make my own role very clear . . .

  Though the light of the moon shines, my room remains pitch-black. Thus, even the pine trees and the mountain seen from the prison window seem to all be enveloped in sadness.5

  His accusers would try to make him out a monster, but his six American military lawyers and a succession of American military jailers liked him from the start. He was large for a Japanese, six feet tall by most accounts, sturdy, and imposing among his more diminutive countrymen, but there was never any swagger in his gait, never any strut. He had the analytical mind of a strategist but the inclination of an artist, the general who wrote poetry, painted flowers, loved nothing so much as a good book. He spoke English well, liked English-language novels, listened to classical Western music. These predilections, and his cosmopolitan looks and ways, gave his political enemies a lot to talk about. In an army of Anglophobes, Homma was said to be “pro-British,” the most “Western”-leaning of the generals of the Imperial General Staff. He resented these aspersions, this insult to his loyalty. He was Japanese, every inch of him. If he thought of himself as anything
, it was a royalist, a patrician without title or brief. He was devoted to the idea of the royal family and the emperor, embodiments, as he saw them, of everything that was Japanese. He was, without question, a romantic, a modern Lancelot clinging to old-fashioned ideals of purity, honor, nobility. Now from a cell in the Yokohama city jail, three days after he had surrendered to American authorities, those ideals must have seemed somewhat shopworn, for he was being cast as a man without virtue or mercy, a low man who held life cheap.

  [Homma, Prison Diary, September 18] Right now, I am being charged with transporting 70,000 prisoners at Bataan for a long distance in the heat and without food or drink and the subsequent deaths that resulted . . . Additional charges that I am not aware of may come up during the trial . . .

  I think I will have to be especially prepared to receive a harsh punishment compared to everyone else.

  He was born in Meiji 21 (1888) in a backwater, Sado Island, fifty miles west of Niigata in the Sea of Japan, the only child of Kankichi and Matsu Homma. In aspect and personality, the boy favored his handsome father, a prosperous gentleman farmer with a taste for the good life. For his worldview, however, he turned to his mother, a devout Buddhist who counseled harmony in all human dealings.

  At eighteen he was accepted into Japan’s prestigious Rikugun Shikan Gakkoō, the national army military academy at Ichigaya in Tokyo and graduated in May 1907, second in a class of 1,183 cadets, a second lieutenant of infantry assigned to a line regiment. In 1912 he won appointment to the Army General Staff College, the service’s elite training school for future generals and general staff officers, and quickly developed a reputation as a ferocious scholar with a talent for language, especially English, memorizing pages at a time from an English dictionary, then, so the legend goes, ripping them out and swallowing them when he was done.6

  After army college, he met a beautiful woman, Toshiko, from a prominent Tokyo family and asked her to marry him. In two years they had two sons, Michio and Masahiko, and not long thereafter, in 1917, Homma was posted to Britain as an attaché and military observer. Either by choice or common practice, Toshiko stayed behind in Tokyo. The years of separation, however, turned out to be too much for her. She seemed to lose interest in her family and sent her children to Sado Island to live with Machi-san, Homma’s widowed mother. Masaharu returned to Japan to try to settle things, but by then Toshiko was living with another man, and Homma filed for divorce.

  Although the scandal stung his pride, it did not hurt his career. By 1925 he was back working at army headquarters, an urbane man well traveled, now rubbing shoulders with some of the capital’s political and business elite, among them the director of the Ooji Paper Manufacturing Company, Naokitsu Takada, and his lovely twenty-one-year-old daughter, Fujiko.

  At their first meeting, Fujiko, wearing a silk kimono of fine gauze with a Chinese sash, served Masaharu tea. She was a bit bewildered by this big man with large eyes, a dark tan, and a white linen suit. He sat there with his hands folded in his lap, so nervous and tongue-tied all he could think to say was, “This is the first time I’ve worn my lieutenant colonel’s badge.” They were married November 8, 1926, in the Ueno section of Tokyo. He was thirty-eight, she was twenty-three. She raised his sons as hers and later had two children of her own, Hisako and Seisako.

  Meanwhile, Homma the soldier steadily gained rank and held important field and staff commands, especially in 1937 as head of the army’s powerful Propaganda Corps. In the years that followed he served in China, then, on November 2, 1941, five weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, General Gen Sugiyama, Imperial Army chief of staff, gave Homma command of the 14th Army. His mission was to take the Philippines in fifty days. Homma won his victory, forced MacArthur to flee, but instead of fifty days, his 14th Army took five months to secure the islands, and a displeased Sugiyama, spurred no doubt by another of Homma’s antagonists, Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo, relieved the general of command, put him on reserve status, and shipped him home in the summer of 1942, in effect cashiering him.

  His army career was over, and he spent the war years at home with Fujiko and their two young children. (Michio, the oldest boy from his first marriage, died of a childhood illness; his second son, Masahiko, joined the army and was stationed in Manchuria, a second lieutenant.) In August 1945, after Japan surrendered, Homma learned from friends in government that his name was on an American list of war criminals, and he slipped out of Tokyo for a few days and headed north to Sado Island to say good-bye to Machi-san, then he surrendered himself to Japanese gendarmes and American intelligence officers.

  [Homma, Prison Diary, September 19] The guards change every day, so the way things are run changes as well . . .

  I can tell that I am the one most hated by the Americans after reading the article in the Mainichi Newspaper that has my name in the headlines. This cannot be helped.

  His world was now a twenty-by-twenty-foot cell in a dank three-story city jail. He had no direct contact with Fujiko or his children, but he could pass word to them through the good offices of a former prime minister, Kantarō Suzuki, who was allowed to visit the prisoners and act as their go-between. Homma had not yet formally been charged or arraigned and had only the vaguest notion of why he’d been arrested. The newspapers were saying that he “ordered the Americans to take the infamous death march of Bataan,” but he’d done no such thing, and he couldn’t understand where the papers were getting that. Some days it seemed they were blaming him for the whole war, and playing the scapegoat didn’t sit well with the general.7

  “The loss of the war is the responsibility of everyone,” he wrote in his diary on September 24. “We are merely the unfortunate ones who are representatively responsible and sacrificed . . . I did not personally do anything wrong . . . I do not have a guilty conscience. This is what I would like my children to understand.”

  EVERY DAY he thought about his fate. He’d read that the accused war criminals in Germany were going to face a court of judges from many nations. Would he too “be subject to an international trial,” he wondered, or would he have to account for himself in front of an American tribunal, judged by men he had once defeated?

  The more he thought about the future, the more disquieted he became. “The cold fall wind touches my skin. My dreams at dawn do not bring tranquillity.”

  On October 3 MacArthur’s headquarters announced it was ready to bring to trial General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines at the end of the war. The Nippon Times said Yamashita would be brought before a United States Military Commission in Manila. The article also included the government’s main charge. Yamashita, it said, had “unlawfully disregarded and failed to discharge his duty as commander to control the operations of the members of his command, permitting them to commit brutal atrocities and other high crimes.”8

  Reading this, Homma was sure he was looking at the basic elements of the government’s case against him as well.

  [Homma, Prison Diary, October 3, 1945] The outcome of Yamashita’s trial will give us an idea of what will happen to us.

  In fact, the charges against the two men, and the tribunals that passed as trials, were not only similar, they were unprecedented and would make political and legal history.

  YAMASHITA had been sent to the Philippines in the fall of 1944 to lead the 275,000 Japanese troops there in a delaying action. The Japanese knew they could not hold the islands—the Americans had more men, ships, planes—but the longer they could keep the enemy fighting, the better their chances at the peace table or, if it came to it, the more time they’d have to prepare for an Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands. During the battle Yamashita lost contact with his field commanders, at least one of whom took it upon himself to wage a gyokusai suru, a fight to the death, in Manila. Thus disposed, Japanese troops and their officers there set about slaughtering thousands of civilians in the city and its surrounding provinces. Yamashita, at first on the run from the American Army, then holed u
p with a third of his command in the mountains 155 miles north of Manila and, cut off from his commanders, apparently knew nothing of the arson, rape, murder, and torture being conducted by the drunken, frenzied hohei holding Manila. In the weeks that followed, the rest of Yamashita’s force spent their time on the run, falling back before the Americans—sick and starving Japanese troops eating grass and hiding in the mountains to stay alive. Finally at 4:00 p.m. on September 1, Yamashita walked down a path from his mountain headquarters and, under a prior arrangement, turned his command and himself over to the American Army. He was immediately arrested and told he would be tried as a war criminal.9

  YAMASHITA, ON TRIAL,

  PLEADS “NOT GUILTY”

  [Nippon Times] MANILA, October 11.—General Tomoyuki Yamashita, so-called “Tiger of Malaya” and last Japanese commander in the Philippines, pleaded innocent today to charges of violating the laws of war in failing to stop the atrocities committed by his troops . . .

  Yamashita was not charged with committing the crimes personally. His trial, scheduled to begin October 29, [will hinge] on the question of responsibility held by the Imperial general for acts of troops under his command [and] will determine the precedent for other future war criminal prosecutions.

  [Homma, Prison Diary] [Yamashita’s] sentencing will be my sentencing as well. I wonder what will happen.

  He wanted to live—on that point he was clear—but if his jail cell diary was a transcript of his psyche, his thoughts turned daily on death.

  October 9: “There are many people here (myself included), who feel that the death penalty is better than being imprisoned here for ten years.”

  October 13: “I would rather be sentenced to death than receive a long prison sentence.”