Year Zero (29 page)

And never more these walls within

Shall echo fierce sedition's din,

Unslaked with blood and crime;

The thirsty dust shall never more

Suck up the darkly streaming gore

Of civic broils, shed out in wrath

And vengeance, crying death for death!
¹²

Not much has changed since Athena watched over her great city. Ending the cycle of vengeance is still the best reason for conducting trials. But one problem with trials after a war, or the fall of a dictatorship, is that there are too many potential defendants. Stalin was perhaps indulging in one of his dark little jokes when he told Churchill at the Teheran Conference in 1943 that fifty thousand German officers should be shot out of hand. Churchill, apparently, was not amused and stomped out of the room in a fury. But Stalin had a point. Even if there is no such thing as collective guilt, there are far more guilty people than can possibly be tried. Yet justice must be seen to be done. This does not mean that individuals put on trial for crimes committed by thousands, and abetted by millions, are scapegoats. But there are cases where people are tried symbolically, as it were, because others cannot be put on trial, because they are too numerous, or out of reach, or protected for political reasons.

One of the worst Japanese war criminals was a medical doctor named Ishii Shiro, an arrogant loner who first made a name for himself as the inventor of a water filtering system. He once startled the Japanese emperor at a demonstration of his device by urinating into his filtered water and inviting His Majesty to take a sip. The emperor politely declined. Ishii was also an early and rather obsessive promoter of bacteriological and chemical warfare. In 1936 the Imperial Army gave him permission to build a vast secret facility near Harbin in Manchukuo, where he could experiment to
his heart's content. Not only did Ishii, and his able staff of Unit 731, including a microbiologist named Kitano Masaji, experiment with bubonic plague, cholera, and other diseases, but thousands of prisoners were used for anything that took the doctors' fancy. The human guinea pigs, mostly Chinese, but also Russians and even a few American POWs, were known as “logs,” or “monkeys.” Some were exposed to freezing experiments, some were hung upside down to see how long it would take before they choked, some were cut open without anesthesia and had organs removed, and some were injected with lethal germs. Another specialty of Unit 731 was to infect large numbers of rats with deadly bacteria and drop them over Chinese cities together with thousands of fleas in porcelain bombs suspended from little parachutes.

The “water filtering facility” near Harbin was destroyed by the retreating Japanese, along with the remaining prisoners in the summer of 1945, just before the Soviet Red Army arrived. The ruins now contain a “patriotic museum” with waxworks of Ishii and his colleagues conducting live vivisections. Ishii, Kitano, and some others actually made it back to Japan. More junior doctors were captured by the Soviets, who put them on trial for war crimes. Even as General MacArthur promised to try Japanese war criminals (always excepting the emperor himself), Ishii quickly disappeared from sight. He managed to convince his interrogators, led by Major General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur's “pet fascist,” that the data culled from his experiments in China would be of great interest to the U.S. Army. Willoughby was convinced that the human experiments, not as readily available to U.S. doctors, had produced vital information. There was considerable worry that the Soviet Union was ahead of the U.S. in this type of research, and, as a U.S. Army medical specialist later wrote in a memo to State Department officials, human experiments were better than animal experiments, and since “any war crimes trial would completely reveal such data to all nations, it is felt that such publicity must be avoided in the interest of defense and national security of the US.”
¹³

Lieutenant General Ishii Shiro died peacefully in Tokyo in 1959. The commissioner of his funeral was his deputy and later successor at
Unit 731, Lieutenant General Kitano Masaji. Kitano, an expert in blood experiments, went on to head Green Cross Corporation, the first commercial blood bank in Japan. There are few traces left by these men, except for the ruins of the prison labs near Harbin, and one curious monument found in a disused rat cellar in China, erected by Kitano in honor of the rodents he dissected for research purposes.

•   •   •

THE FIRST WAR CRIME TRIAL
in the Pacific War theater was that of General Yamashita Tomoyuki, also known (respectfully in Japan, fearfully elsewhere) as “the Tiger of Malaya.” General Yamashita actually spent very little time in Malaya, but he had earned his sobriquet by taking Singapore in February 1942 against a much superior force; thirty thousand Japanese against more than one hundred thousand British and Commonwealth troops. The humiliating scene of Yamashita facing Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, with the Japanese general demanding an immediate answer to his question whether Percival would surrender, “yes or no!”, can still be seen as a waxwork tableau in the amusement park on Singapore's Sentosa Island.

The wartime prime minister, General Tojo, who disliked and distrusted Yamashita, perhaps because of the latter's superior military skills, or perhaps because of Yamashita's skepticism about Japan's war with the Western powers, whisked him away from Southeast Asia and sidelined him in Manchukuo, where he had no chance to shine on any battlefield. Yamashita was dispatched back to the region only after Tojo lost power in 1944. He was handed the thankless task of defending the Philippines after it had become indefensible.

At his trial during the fall of 1945, Yamashita was accused of permitting one of the worst atrocities committed during World War II: the Massacre of Manila.

There was no dispute about the events. Trapped in Manila by advancing U.S. forces in February 1945, more than twenty thousand Japanese, mostly from the Imperial Japanese Navy, were ordered to fight to the
death and to lay as much of the Philippine capital to waste as they could while they were at it. After plunging into the ample supplies of beer and rice wine put at their disposal, the troops went on an orgy of violence. Women of all ages were raped and murdered. Babies and children were smashed against walls or ripped apart with bayonets. Men were mutilated for sport and massacred. Hospitals were raided and patients burned alive. Houses and buildings were torched. And all the while, the city was being bombarded and shelled by U.S. tanks and howitzers while Japanese fought off American attacks using flamethrowers and bazookas. After one month of mayhem, Manila was a flaming ruin. The devastation was on a par with that of Warsaw, and up to one hundred thousand Filipinos were murdered in this extended bloody spree.

Manila had been General Douglas MacArthur's stamping grounds before the war. His rooms at the Manila Hotel had been badly damaged in the carnage. He recorded his state of shock as he watched the attack on the hotel from a distance: “Suddenly the penthouse blazed into flame. They had fired it. I watched, with indescribable feelings, the destruction of my fine military library, my souvenirs, my personal belongings of a lifetime . . . I was tasting to the last acid dregs the bitterness of a devastated and beloved home.”
¹⁴

For MacArthur, what happened in Manila in 1945, and what had happened there three years earlier when he had been driven out by the Japanese Imperial Army under General Homma Masaharu, was a personal affront. So the trials held against both Homma and Yamashita in Manila were rather personal too. Orders came from Washington to arrange for speedy trials, following decisions made by the Allies in June 1945 to prosecute war criminals. But they were to be held by military commissions under MacArthur's command. The judges were appointed by MacArthur, and the procedures were managed by MacArthur. This left many people who were there with the distinct impression that these were not trials to still the fires of vengeance; they
were
a form of vengeance.

Someone had to pay for the heinous crimes in Manila, as well as other brutalities perpetrated under Japanese occupation: the Bataan Death
March in April 1942, the starving of POWs, the destruction of Filipino villages and towns, the torture prisons under the
Kempeitai
. Since the collaborators in the Filipino elite were largely shielded from prosecution, and the most active Filipino resisters were being crushed in the name of anticommunism, a villain was badly needed to show Filipinos, who had suffered so much, that justice was still being done; a brutal face had to be matched to the nameless mass of killers. Someone had to hang.

Yamashita Tomoyuki certainly looked the part: a squat, bullnecked figure with narrow, myopic eyes, his was the cartoon image of the Japanese war criminal. Filipinos were encouraged to come and watch him being tried in the old High Commissioner's residence. One old woman was so embittered by her wartime experiences that she carried rocks in her purse to throw at the monstrous Japanese general. And some American reporters did their best to condemn him before he was convicted. As the trial reporter for
Yank
put it nicely: “From the very beginning of the proceedings, you couldn't find a sucker to bet two
pesos
to 200 on Yamashita's acquittal.”
¹⁵

Yank
continued: “In the bullet-scarred High Commissioner's office, where he once ruled as a conqueror, general Yamashita stood before a tribunal of five as a war criminal. He was receiving a fair trial, according to law—something the general hadn't bothered to give his victims.”

This is almost entirely wrong. Yamashita had never been in the High Commissioner's office before and certainly not as a conqueror. He arrived in the Philippines for the first time just before MacArthur waded ashore in the Leyte Gulf. Defending the country was by then a hopeless cause. Yamashita didn't know the terrain. The chain of command was in tatters. His troops were scattered all over the Philippine islands. Communications had been largely cut. Food was no longer getting to most soldiers roaming in the mountains. Gasoline was barely available. Troops were badly trained and demoralized by hunger, exhaustion, and the tropical climate. Harassed by Filipino guerrillas and overwhelmed by superior U.S. forces, Yamashita had no chance to even see his troops, let alone lead them as a conqueror.

The Manila Massacre was at least partly the result of Japanese disarray. Yamashita's headquarters were in the mountains almost two hundred miles from Manila. Knowing that he could not defend the capital, he ordered all Japanese troops to withdraw, including the marines who were nominally under his command. Manila would be an open city, with only sixteen hundred soldiers left behind to guard military supplies. But naval commanders dithered. Some wanted to fight to the last man. Others talked about a retreat but not before wrecking the harbor facilities. It wasn't clear who commanded whom. Orders went unanswered. As so often happened in the Japanese armed forces, middle-ranking officers took things into their own hands and the most zealous prevailed. By the time a furious Yamashita insisted once again on their retreat, the soldiers and sailors were stuck in Manila with no way out but death.

Yamashita certainly didn't face a fair trial. The judges were military desk officers whose knowledge of the law was as scanty as their understanding of battlefield conditions. One of them was so bored that he spent much of the time in deep slumber. MacArthur put all necessary resources at the disposal of the prosecution, whereas the defense lawyers were picked at the last possible minute. There was no time to investigate the more than sixty criminal charges, and even more were added just before the trial began. Rules of evidence and other procedures seemed to be arbitrary, if not rigged. In a “special proclamation” from MacArthur, the rules established by the Allies in June were restated: “The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and non-technical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value. All purported admissions or statements of the accused are admissible.”
¹⁶

Alas for Yamashita, this included dubious affidavits as well as statements by a shady couple of former collaborators who tried to cleanse their reputations by subjecting the court to wild allegations of the Japanese general's alleged plans to exterminate the entire Filipino people. There was also a succession of traumatized witnesses who told their stories about horrific violence during the sacking of Manila. In the words of the
Yank
report: “Sobbing girl witnesses told of repeated attacks by Jap soldiers. Many of the girls said they were forced to submit at bayonet point . . . An extract of the testimony: ‘. . . A 12-year old was lying on a mat on the floor. She was covered with blood and the mat where she was lying was saturated with blood.'”

Again, few doubted the truth of such stories. The question was whether Yamashita could have known about them, and even then, could have done anything to stop the violence. At the Nuremberg trials, which were taking place at that same time, German generals were prosecuted only for war crimes which they ordered, abetted, or personally participated in. There was no proof of Yamashita's having done any of these things. Indeed, his orders pointed in the opposite direction. And so he was charged with a crime that had not existed before, namely, of not being able to stop atrocities committed by troops over whom he had no control and who deliberately went against his orders.
Yank
stated with confidence that Yamashita had been treated fairly “according to law.” If so, it was no law that Yamashita, or any other military commander, had been even remotely aware of. On December 7, 1945, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Yamashita Tomoyuki was sentenced to death by hanging. He bowed to his judges and thanked the United States for giving him the benefit of “upright American officers and gentlemen as defense counsel.” Major Robert Kerr told a newspaper reporter that he had come to the Pacific expecting to shoot Japs on the beaches, not to hang them, but that it was all the same to him.
¹⁷