Tears in the Darkness

by Michael Norman

  Some of the drama took place in pretrial motions, one in particular, the matter of the trial’s convening authority, Douglas A. MacArthur. As supreme commander of Allied powers in Japan, MacArthur in his headquarters in Tokyo was the provenance for everything that was taking place in the courtroom in Manila. He was empowered to pick the judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys. He had the authority to decide which defendants would be tried before military commissions and which would enjoy the more protective legalities of an international tribunal run by experienced civilian judges. He had set the rules of evidence, the court procedures, the timetables for the trials. And it was MacArthur who would certify the verdicts, which made his office alone the place of last appeal. He could set aside a sentence, save a man’s life, or establish the time, place, and manner of his execution.

  The Yamashita defense team had largely avoided the issue of MacArthur’s overarching judicial power. Homma’s lawyers, however, were determined to press the point. And at a press conference the week before the opening of the trial, they mentioned the incendiary issue.

  “No man,” they told reporters, “should be placed in the position of being in essence accuser, prosecutor, defense counsel, judge, jury, court of review, and court of final appeal. He should particularly not be placed in this position where he is a military commander who was defeated by the accused in a campaign out of which the charges arose.”

  Almost immediately their boss, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard A. Brown of Sioux City, Iowa, the head of the war crimes section of the Manila judge advocate general’s office, grabbed the young lawyers and gave them a tongue lashing. They were accusing the supreme commander of conducting a kangaroo court, he said, and in referring to MacArthur as having been “defeated by the accused,” they were poking a stick in the supreme commander’s eye. Did they have any idea what the army could do to them? Brown asked. MacArthur may be “a black-hearted son of a bitch,” Brown said, but he was the army, and the army “never forgets.”

  ALONE in his cell on the second floor of the residence, waiting for the proceedings to start, Homma felt himself unraveling.

  [Homma, Prison Diary, December 30, 1945] [Ichiro] Kishimoto [interpreter] came by to bring me some personal things this evening. I cried again after seeing pictures of my wife and children and after rereading their letters. Why do I do such cruel things to myself after trying so hard to not think about them?

  [January 1, 1946] I do not fear death, but I also do not want to die . . . I dreamt at night that all of my teeth fell out and I could not get any false teeth to replace them. This was a nightmare that got worse from last night when I dreamt that four of my teeth fell out. I guess it is natural that I do not have any good dreams.

  [January 2] This evening, I plan on clipping my nails and cutting my hair, which I will have them take back [to Japan] in place of my remains.

  THE PROSECUTION began by calling to the stand Japanese staff officers to talk about the 14th Army chain of command. Bob Pelz was on his feet during a lot of this testimony, objecting to the rules of evidence or challenging the accuracy of something a witness said. General Donovan appeared annoyed by these interruptions, and at the end of the first week, on Sunday, their first day off, the chief judge summoned Lieutenant Colonel Frank Meek, the lead prosecutor, and Major Skeen, head of the defense team, to his office. He wanted to talk about the attorney from New York.

  [Pelz, Journal, January 6, 1946] Gen. Donovan is enraged at me . . . He as much as admitted that he would like to hold me in contempt, but can’t find an excuse. Skeen and I went over the record . . . Naturally I’m paranoid, but it only enhances my basic ideas about Army brass hats who can’t stand the slightest opposition.

  Truth was, the first week of trial disgusted Bob Pelz. “Donovan is rushing the thing through and anything goes,” he wrote in his journal. “More and more the trial looks like a farce. What else can it be when anything comes into evidence? I’ll never mock common law rules of evidence again . . . The reporters can already see that Donovan plans to brook no delay. He reconvenes the commission before he hits the chair.”

  On Wednesday, January 9, the prosecution finally got to the core of its case and trotted out the first in what was to become a grim and relentless parade of witnesses who had been on what the press now commonly called the “death march.”

  The parade had been carefully assembled, a string of survivors and a thick folder of affidavits, testimony to document the atrocious behavior of the Japanese guards and the suffering of the tens of the thousands of American and Filipino prisoners of war who, beginning April 9, 1942, had struggled up the Old National Road from Mariveles or points north to the railhead at San Fernando, sixty-six miles of hunger and thirst, murder and mayhem.

  The stories these witnesses told stunned the courtroom and created in many in the audience the same sense of shock and surreality suffered by the men who had made the march. All part of the prosecution’s plan. Let the living bring the dead into the courtroom—the headless shades, the bloody poltergeists, the wretched phantoms—and bury the defendant with the spectral detritus of the past.

  It did not seem to matter to the judges, as Bob Pelz said in his diary, that most of the witnesses’ tales were “exaggerated a little after the passage of years”—prevarication and perjury motivated by a desire for revenge, the need of the survivors to strike back at their torturers and tormentors. And it didn’t matter because, as Bob Pelz wrote, their tall tales were “reasonably true.” So what if only thirty men, not two hundred, had been penned together in an excrement-covered field? And what did it matter if there were only two heads alongside the road between Lamao and Limay instead of eight, ten, twenty? There was enough fact in the fictions issuing from the witness chair to give the defense trouble, enough truth in all that telling to be “very damaging” to the balding man in the business suit, the sad-faced defendant.

  The defense, given only fifteen days to prepare its case, had neither the time nor the resources to vet the testimony or separate opinion and opprobrium from fact. They continued to object, pointing out inconsistencies, gaps in logic, memories that didn’t seem to track. But most of the time the most they could do was listen.

  Here, for example, was Master Sergeant James Baldassarre, a rear-echelon soldier who had worked in supply at one of the main food dumps on Bataan. Baldassarre was a perfect prosecution witness. Fifty-one years old and a career soldier with twenty-eight years in the service, he knew exactly what was expected of him in court.

  Q: Now, did you notice anything along the road as you were marching between Balanga and Lubao?

  A: Many Americans and Filipinos were slaughtered by the Japanese.

  Q: Did you see them slaughtered?

  A: I saw many Americans and Filipinos who were shot by the Japanese between Balanga and Lubao, many of them.

  Q: You personally saw that?

  A: Yes sir, I see it.

  Q: Did you see many bodies?

  A: Many of them. Hundreds of them. God knows how many! Filipinos, American women and Filipino women in a family way stabbed right through the belly, and children stabbed.

  Baldassarre had seen it all, including atrocities no one else had seen. Then he told the court he had spotted the Japanese commander along the road.

  Q: Now during this march from Bataan did you see any high ranking Japanese officers riding on the route of the march?

  A: Many of them, quite a few of them. There is one right in this place now right now, that I can recognize who was riding in an official car, a Japanese official car.

  Q: Who is that?

  A: Lieutenant General Homma . . . He was there; he must be there, his car was there. Of course, I can’t verify if it was correct, but it must be him in the car. The car was there . . . I also asked a Japanese guard. I said, “Who is that man?” He said, “That is General Homma.”24

  Other men would tell the same tale, and at the time it did not seem to strike the commission judges as curious that Japanese guards
, barely literate in their own language, spoke English or that they would take the time to point out their commander to the enemy prisoners they were hurriedly pushing north off the peninsula.

  After his appearance, Baldassarre paused outside court to talk to reporters and deliver what Time magazine called “a fierce little speech.”

  They should hang the man. He is a no-good son of a bitch. I should pull the rope. This is too much of a trial. They should never give him a trial. They never trialed us. They killed people like flies. Send him to me. I’ll fix him up.

  “Then,” Time went on, “Sergeant Baldassarre put a cigar in his mouth, pushed his overseas cap back off his sunburned forehead and walked out with the air of a man who has just paid an old debt.”25

  The bitter testimony of death march witnesses disconcerted the defendant, as almost everyone in court could see.

  [Homma, Prison Diary, January 9] We have finally entered the Bataan march stage [of the trial]. The American soldiers are all upset, and in that anger, they have put together all these lies. I am so upset by this that my eyes start to tear.

  His attorneys could see his discomfort was genuine.

  [Pelz, Journal, January 9] [Homma] was shaken and practically in tears from emotion and fury—the last because he said there were not hundreds of dead. He seems concerned that we of the defense should believe it.

  The next day, Thursday, January 10, the prosecution called thirty-two-year-old Philippine Army Captain Pedro Felix, one of the few survivors of the massacre on April 12, 1942. The captain told the court how after surrender, his unit, the 91st Infantry, had been herded along trails through the hills until it reached a ravine near the Pantingan River. He recounted how the officers and sergeants had been segregated from the rest of the men, how they were wired together in groups of twenty or more and made to stand looking down into the ravine.

  Q: How many times in all were you bayonetted?

  A: I was bayonetted four times sir.

  Q: You say that two of these bayonet thrusts went through you. Will you kindly indicate by your hands on your body where they entered and where they came out? Stand up.

  The chief judge interrupted.

  Donovan: I would like to go a little further than that and have him pull his shirt off and indicate it.

  Felix got to his feet, stripped to his waist, and turned his bare back toward the five generals on the bench.

  Donovan: Do you count four [scars] there?

  Felix: Yes, sir.

  Donovan: One, two, three, four—is that correct?

  Meek [chief prosecutor]: Yes, sir . . .

  Donovan: Thank you very much. You can put your shirt on later.26

  By the end of the day, the defendant was reeling.

  “I saw Homma this evening,” Bob Pelz wrote, “and he is becoming a broken man. I truly believe he had no idea of the things that had occurred.”

  [Homma, Prison Diary, January 11] It pains me to listen. All the strength has left my knees, and I feel as though I am going to break down.

  With the recounting of each atrocity, Homma’s face seemed to sag, and his shoulders rolled forward as if his body were about to fold in on itself.

  On Saturday morning, January 19, Dr. Gilbert T. Cullen, a sixty-eight-year-old American physician who had been living and working for years on the island of Panay, slowly made his way to the witness stand. Cullen told how Japanese soldiers, convinced he had information about American forces, beat the old doctor, then took out ropes and strung him up, first by his thumbs and then his toes and ankles, pulled some of his nails out, burned his flesh, beat him again, and again.

  [Pelz, Journal, January 19] Homma closed his eyes in obvious anguish and [General] Donovan noticed it, even nudging [Major General Basilio] Valdes [another judge]. Later Donovan, whom we are all getting to like better, told Skeen [head of the defense], “I really believe that old man is suffering when he hears some of these atrocities.”

  It was as if his officers, from the most junior subaltern to his chief of staff, had let him down. They knew how to press a fight, all right, how to get their nikudan, their human bullets, to throw themselves against an enemy, but either through intent or indifference they had failed in their duty to control their men. In fact in many cases, too many, it was now clear to the general, they had even encouraged the violence, incited the terrible impulse in all fighting men to keep killing and wounding even after the battle has been won.

  And it was this appetite to injure, instilled in basic training, whetted by the “warrior” ethos, and inherent in every army that has ever taken the field, that led the hohei to turn a parade of prisoners into a death march. Homma had been accused of violating the law of war, that loose canon of traditions and conventions that presumes limits on the behavior of soldiers in battle, everyone acting according to the rules, reasonable men killing one another in reasonable ways. If the evidence proved anything, it proved that presumption false.

  AFTER SIXTEEN DAYS OF TRIAL, the prosecution had called 136 people to the witness stand and had introduced into evidence 322 exhibits. Their strategy had been clear from the outset: try to show that during his tenure as commander in chief, Homma had either allowed, ignored, or tacitly encouraged (the five judges could take their pick) a broad pattern of atrocity and abuse. There was little, if any, evidence that the defendant knew of these crimes, so prosecutors tried to use the weight of accusation and inference to bury him.

  On January 21 the prosecution finished its case, and the court recessed for a week to give the defense time to prepare its witnesses. The plan was to divide the defense witnesses into two groups. The first would try to answer the charges; the second would testify to the defendant’s good character. People who knew him well, old friends and comrades and family too—his wife, Fukjiko.

  Homma had been dead set against her appearing. He did not want her pilloried in the press or on the witness stand, but his lawyers, short on time and effective witnesses, had insisted. They needed her, they told him, and, judging from his hangdog demeanor, so did he.

  FUJIKO had arrived on a Sunday in the early morning dark. The next day, Bob Pelz, Frank Coder, and George Furness paid her a courtesy call. She gave each attorney a small gift, a token of thanks for defending her husband. They were instantly enchanted. “A charming lady,” Pelz wrote, “she seems to carry her load beautifully.”

  On Wednesday, the defense trotted her out for photographers. “She makes a wonderful impression wherever she goes,” Bob Pelz thought, “so graceful and charming is she.” And on Saturday, she sat for a press conference. Through an interpreter she told reporters how she’d been married for twenty years and had two children, a daughter and son, eighteen and sixteen years old, respectively. Then she answered a few questions about her husband. She described him as a quiet, almost bookish man who enjoyed the plays of John Galsworthy and George Bernard Shaw. His favorite novel, she volunteered, was by an American named Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind. When she was done she smiled, bowed slightly, retired with the attorneys in tow. A real “Japanese lady,” Time magazine said.27

  The army ensconced her in the nurses’ quarters at a local hospital, a nice room with a high, Western-style bed, a dresser, makeup table, nightstand, and chair. Accustomed to rationing and shortages, she found the food “extravagant,” and remembering that her family was going without rice in destitute Tokyo, she felt “suddenly . . . shameful” eating her dinner.

  Skeen had promised she could visit her husband regularly, and the morning after she arrived the lawyer came to fetch her.

  “I will try to let you see him as much as possible,” Skeen said. “Please just follow the regulations.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “When I say ‘regulations,’ they are not complicated. For example, weapons are forbidden, but since this does not seem to be within the realm of the manners of the Japanese, I suppose it won’t be a problem.”

  She appreciated the American’s sense of humor. A while
later a staff car carried her to the residence of the former high commissioner. Downstairs she was introduced to Marshall Williams, a captain of the military police who would be monitoring her meeting with her husband. Captain Williams led her upstairs and across a hallway to the door of what appeared to be an old storage room. The room had two sleeping cots against the wall. Her husband was standing there in a dark business suit, waiting. He looked spent, and when he saw her, his Fu-san, he started to cry.

  They went downstairs to the library, and with Captain Williams standing off to the side they sat down and talked. Masaharu was nervous at first, his heart pounding against his chest. After a few minutes the sound of his wife’s voice began to soothe and calm him, and he could feel his fear falling away.

  In the days that followed, husband and wife were allowed to meet often. A member of the defense staff would drive Fujiko over to the residence, and as soon as she entered the great front hall, Captain Williams would greet her and shout up to the second floor, “Your wife is here to see you.” Then she would hear footfalls on the stairs and her husband would come down with a bright expression on his face.

  Each meeting lasted about thirty minutes. She wanted to stay longer, and could have; Skeen had asked Williams to give the couple more time, but the general, watching the clock, always rose to end their meeting exactly on the half hour.