“You should go now,” he would say to her, rather formally. “We must not take advantage of Mr. Williams’s kindness. He is taking time away from his own rest period to come here to watch over us.”
Then, as he turned to go, he would always say the same thing to his jailer. “Please look after my wife.”
IN ALL THEY MET EIGHT TIMES. At each meeting he wanted to talk about what should happen when he was gone—the arrangements for his funeral, the children’s future, his aging mother’s comfort, and the like. She did not.
“It’s all right,” she would say, whenever he tried to broach the subject. “We will still be able to eat meals together soon.”28
After a while, he gave up trying to get her to talk about what would happen when he was gone and decided to put what he wanted to say on paper.
[Homma, letter, “The State of My Mind on January 24”] I find my mind strangely calm. It may be resignation if it had to be explained. Since I saw the face of my wife and read letters from my children, I have come to feel an extremely transcendental feeling over life and death . . . I have seen the person I wanted to see . . . In my wife’s hands I can leave my mother and the future of my children with no worry.
[“To My Wife, January 25”] In 20 years of our married life, we’ve had many differences of opinion. Those quarrels have now become sweet memories . . . Twenty years feels short but it is long. I am content that we have lived a happy life together.
If there is what is called the other world, we’ll be married again there. I’ll go first and wait for you there, but you mustn’t hurry. Live as long as you can for the children and do things I haven’t been able to do, for me. You will see our grandchildren or great grandchildren and tell me all about them when we meet again in the other world. Thank you very much for everything . . . With endless regret I part with you.29
NONE OF HOMMA’S ATTORNEYS expected to win the case, but it was clear they were making progress with at least two of the five judges—Brigadier General Arthur G. Trudeau and Major General Basilio J. Valdes of the Philippine Army. Perhaps one or both could be swayed to spare the defendant’s life.
In his opening statement on Monday, January 28, chief defense attorney John Skeen laid out his case. He began by depicting Homma as an outsider in his own army. Then he contended that the general was ill served by officers who had ignored his instructions and had not kept him informed, this while the general was preoccupied with the “bitter campaign” to finish the fight in the Philippines, a job that made it “impossible to direct his full attention” to administration or oversight, particularly of the garrison units responsible for moving the prisoners of war.30
The prosecution had been unable to link the defendant directly to the death march, the centerpiece horror of the government’s case. It could produce no evidence whatsoever—no documents or testimony—that Homma had either ordered the bloody atrocities that took place on the Old National Road or that he had been told about the slaughter and had failed to stop it. Instead, prosecutors had relied on circumstantial evidence and the power of inference. Now the defense had to counter those inferences, and Homma’s lawyers could think of only two lines of attack.
They could establish their client’s ignorance—try to prove he did not know what his men were doing—or they could shift the responsibility for the crime to someone else. As it turned out, they tried both tacks. The first involved them in a conundrum; the second had them chasing a ghost.
The defense began by calling as witnesses several of Homma’s staff officers, men who, presumably, could show that Homma was unaware of the events taking place on the Old National Road. Homma had suggested the names to his attorneys. He had also warned them that his men might lie.
Lieutenant General Takeji Wachi took the stand first. “A sinister-looking little man,” The New York Times described him. Wachi said Homma had issued orders to all unit commanders to treat prisoners of war with a “friendly spirit and not to mistreat them.” Then he testified that he had been on the Old National Road five times on various errands during the two weeks of the death march and had seen soldiers falling along the wayside. “What action did you take?” he was asked. The Japanese put the sick men on trucks, Wachi said, and when there were no trucks coming by, “I had the Japanese soldiers give a hand and carry these prisoners to a place such as beneath the eaves of a building and place them down there.”31
Guards helping prisoners into the shade? Trucks pulling over to give them a ride?
Q: Did you see any dead bodies along the road there?
A: No, none at all, none at all.
Q: Were you ever informed of any atrocities committed by the Japanese Army against prisoners of war during the march? . . .
A: No, I have never heard of it . . .
Q: Did you ever receive any report of any deaths of prisoners on that march? . . .
A: I heard later that there were some who died.
Q: About how many?
A: I don’t remember the number but it wasn’t many.
Q: Was any report made to you as chief of staff of the execution of prisoners?
A: I found no cases of executions.32
And so it went, one incredible assertion after another. Major Moriya Wada, who had been assigned to work with the supply and transportation section, the units whose soldiers acted as guards on the death march, told the court that he had seen only five dead along the road. When his superior, a colonel in the transportation section, heard of these corpses, he ordered his staff “to inspect the dead closely and bury them.”
Wada: As a result of this order, around the 20th of April the report came in that the men who died along the road between Balanga and San Fernando died because of sickness.
Q: Did the report state how many they had buried along the road?
A: Yes.
Q: How many?
A: They reported that there were approximately 18 bodies between the IIth [of April] and the 18th.33
The pat answers and apparent fictions were obvious to almost everyone. Even the most untutored courtroom observer could see that after more than two thousand pages of prosecution testimony, there was no denying the death march, no denying the hundreds of bodies by the road or the scars being counted by the judges. So why did the witnesses lie? Because “we live in an age of terror,” Homma told his attorneys in private. If his men had admitted that they had ill served their commander by insulating him from the grim actualities of the march—failing to report what they were being told about the atrocities, or misrepresenting what they had seen firsthand driving the road—they knew they would likely find themselves on trial along with their chief.
SO THE DEFENSE TRIED a second tack. It sought to show the defendant as a commander whose authority, especially his control over his troops, was undermined by the handful of interlopers from Tokyo and Saigon dispatched by headquarters to “advise” the general, in effect agents his political enemies had sent to eavesdrop and interfere in his command.
Foremost among these was a name the defense discovered during pretrial interviews: Masanobu Tsuji, a forty-year-old lieutenant colonel on the Imperial General Staff in Tokyo whose specialty was operations and intelligence, mass murder, and political chaos.
In an army of ultraconservatives, Tsuji was among the most arch, an intriguer who apparently knew no bounds. He believed his country was fighting a race war, and he hated whites (save Germans and Italians, Japan’s Axis partners) and any Asians allied with them. “We must, at the very least, beat these Westerners into submission . . . with no thought of leniency,” he wrote in a monograph widely circulated in the Imperial Army. In early April 1942, several days before Homma launched his second offensive on Bataan, Masanobu Tsuji appeared unannounced in Manila. He told Homma’s staff that he had been sent as a “liaison” from Tokyo. Then he got into a car and set out for various field headquarters on Bataan, collaring division and regimental commanders and issuing strange and frightening orders.34
Wachi test
ified that Tsuji had tried to bully division commanders in the field into following his suggestion to “mete out . . . severe treatment” to prisoners of war.
Q: What did you mean by “severe treatment”?
A: It means to kill.35
Here was the villain the defense had been looking for, a real war criminal, Tokyo’s agent provocateur urging Homma’s field commanders to order their troops to molest and murder unarmed American prisoners of war, those keto, hairy white beasts.
The problem was, Tsuji was nowhere to be found, no record of his death, no reports of his person. Just the testimony of Homma’s staff officers, witnesses whose credibility was obviously in question. (Years later, other staff officers would come forward to talk about the homicidal colonel, among them Lieutenant General Takeo Imai, at the time commander of the 141st Infantry Regiment on Bataan. Imai said Tsuji told him, “Kill all your prisoners,” but Imai refused to act without written orders, and a few days later, the enigmatic Colonel Tsuji was gone.)36
DESPITE THE REALITIES of the trial and the weaknesses in the defense case, Bob Pelz still hoped his client might escape the rope. “Maj. Gen. Valdes [one of the five judges] . . . has been tremendously impressed by Homma’s obviously sincere emotions during this trial,” the attorney wrote in his diary. “Valdes says he has not slept for three nights because of the trial. Despite the killings of some in his family by Japs, despite everything, he does not want to hang a man who could not control these troops in their actions . . . I wonder if any American generals have this sensitivity.”
On February 5, the day Homma was scheduled to testify, word reached the Philippines that the U.S. Supreme Court had denied General Yamashita’s appeal, rejecting all the legal arguments Homma’s defense team had hoped to use in its case as well.
In the majority (6–2) opinion written by Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone, the court ruled that the defendant could be tried by a military commission, a wartime court, because (absent a peace treaty) America and Japan technically were still at war. Since such a commission was legal, and since the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction to review the findings of military commissions, the defendant in effect had no claim to protection under the Fifth Amendment. In plain terms, as an enemy combatant, he had no legal right to a “fair trial,” at least as that term was understood by most Americans and spelled out in the Constitution of the United States.
At the heart of the case, of course, was the issue of command responsibility. The majority held that the law of war “plainly imposed on petitioner . . . an affirmative duty to take such measures as were within his power and appropriate in the circumstances” to protect civilians and prisoners of war from harm. Thus, the court concluded, the defendant’s “responsibility” was clear.37
Not to the two dissenting justices, however. Wiley B. Rutledge and Frank Murphy thought the majority’s reasoning was rife with pettifoggery.
To Rutledge, the great issue, as he called it, was the Fifth Amendment with its “safeguards” for a fair trial, safeguards Yamashita had been denied. His trial, the justice wrote, was filled with “broad departures from the fundamentals of fair play,” fundamentals at the heart of American culture and society.
“I cannot believe in the face of this record that the petitioner has had the fair trial our Constitution and laws command.” Using italics to add emphasis, Rutledge wrote, “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”38
Justice Murphy, a civil libertarian and former high commissioner in the Philippines, was even more pointed. Yamashita, he wrote, had been “rushed to trial under an improper charge, given insufficient time to prepare an adequate defense, deprived of the benefits of some of the most elementary rules of evidence and summarily sentenced to be hanged.”
The trial had thus undermined the very values so many Americans had given their lives to defend. At its heart, he said, was “an uncurbed spirit of revenge and retribution, masked in formal legal procedure for purposes of dealing with a fallen enemy commander.”
Such a spirit, he went on, was “unworthy of the traditions of our people” and “to conclude otherwise, is to admit that the enemy has lost the battle but has destroyed our ideals.”39
IF HOMMA STILL HOPED for a reprieve, he did not say. But learning of the Court’s decision the same day he was to take the witness stand likely deepened his dread.
At midmorning on Tuesday, February 5, lead defense counsel John Skeen started the direct examination of his client.
Q: How long did you serve in the Japanese Army?
A: I was with the Japanese Army about 38 years.
Then Skeen took him through that career, trying to turn his liabilities as a general into evidence to support the defense case—his affinity for Anglos, his liberal ideas, his disagreements with Tojo and the high command.
Skeen’s next job was more difficult—to show the commission how a Japanese commander in chief could be isolated in the middle of his own army.
Q: Did you choose your own staff officers?
A: No, I did not choose my staff officers. I was almost the last [member of the 14th Army staff assigned to the Philippine invasion force].
Q: From where did the order come regarding appointments of staff officers in the Japanese Army?
A: From Imperial GHQ.
Q: Could you remove any staff officers or senior commander on your own authority?
A: No, I cannot.40
So he was surrounded by subordinates who owed their political loyalty, and army careers, to others, and those subordinates had an unusual amount of power and autonomy. They could keep him informed or not, and in doing so they could, in effect, manipulate his orders, a practice so common in the Imperial Army it even had a name, gekokujo, “the rule of the higher by the lower,” a reflection of the power of the junior officer corps, whose ranks were rife with political incendiaries, cunning zealots in key posts.41
AFTER LUNCH, Skeen prepared to take his client through the most difficult part of his testimony.
Skeen asked him if he’d had occasion to be on the Old National Road during the movement of prisoners north.
Yes, Homma said, he had been on the roads of Bataan three times during that period.
Q: Did you see any signs of mistreatment of prisoners?
A: Oh, no, I did not.
Q: Did any one of your staff officers make an inspection of the march of prisoners from Bataan to San Fernando?
A: Yes, I think they did, on their own initiative . . . General Wachi, Colonel Takatsu, and Major Wada, they did.
Q: . . . Did you receive any reports from these officers as to mistreatment of prisoners on the march?
A: I did not receive any such report.
Q: Now, had they seen occurrences, would they have been reported to you?
A: Certainly they would.
Q: Did you receive reports from any officers, or anyone, as to mistreatment of prisoners on the march?
A: I did not receive any such reports.
Q: . . . What was the apparent physical condition of the prisoners [that you’d seen]?
A: They looked rather tired and haggard.
Q: . . . In your trip[s] did you see any bodies, dead bodies, along the road?
A: No, I did not see. From the testimony I heard in court it appeared to me that there were many dead bodies lying along the roadside, but I do not see how it could be so, why I did not see any bodies lying on the road on my whole trip. However, I was not looking for them particularly, to find them.42
It was a risky strategy, born more of desperation than design. Skeen, Pelz, and company were pinning their case on their client’s credibility. Homma was telling the court that he’d seen nothing untoward along the route of the march, a general in a staff car with his mind so fixed on finishing a battle that he could look out the window without noticing the trees. Maybe the judges, all generals themselves, men who also had experienced the myopia of command, would believe him.
ON CROSS-EX
AMINATION, Frank Meek, the chief prosecutor, tore away at each of the defendant’s assertions.
Q: . . . You were reported to have said [in a newspaper interview in Tokyo after arrest] “I saw the death march, and it wasn’t very bad.”
A: . . . I meant that I saw the march, which I related here.
Q: And what you did see of it, you didn’t think it was very bad?
A: I stated here yesterday that I saw a few columns of the march, and nothing—I saw nothing extraordinary happen.
Q: . . . While you were in command in the Philippines, no report was ever made to you of any deaths in that march?
A: It may have been made, but I cannot state with any amount of certainty.
Q: . . . There were many atrocities . . . Prisoners were beaten, bayonetted and shot . . . Does that indicate to you that the plan for the kind of treatment of prisoners of war that you had issued prior to the invasion was being followed out?
A: I came to know for the first time in the court of such atrocities, and I am ashamed of myself should these atrocities have happened.43
At the end of his cross-examination, Meek focused on the main charge: Homma’s overarching responsibility as commander in chief.
Q: You knew that your responsibility was to treat prisoners of war according to the terms of international law and the Geneva Convention?
A: I shouldn’t call it a responsibility, but I knew that prisoners of war should be treated according to international law.
Q: You knew that was your responsibility, to see that was done, didn’t you?
A: It should be observed.
Tears in the Darkness Page 43