Yamashita trial

He would abandon Manila and its environs and head for the hills. Already resigned to losing eventually, Yamashita simply hoped to occupy as much of the island as possible to deny its use to MacArthur. He later claimed that he was already prepared to cede Manila to MacArthur when the Sixth Army struck.

Meanwhile, Iwabuchi put his own simple plan into effect. Iwabuchi planned to defend Manila to the death. On January 9, , MacArthur finally mounted his invasion of Luzon. Two days later, Krueger established a secure beachhead and began forging inland. For the rest of the month he piled on new divisions, until almost the entire Sixth Army was ashore. Remarkably, MacArthur was still hopeful that Manila could be taken without a serious fight.

To that end he ordered his soldiers and airmen to use restraint when taking the city. MacArthur completely forbade the use of tactical airstrikes in the city, and he told his gunners to shoot sparingly.

There were both philosophical and practical reasons for doing so, MacArthur told his generals. Second, if Yamashita allowed his army to be bottled up in Manila, he could not defend the rest of the island. Perhaps MacArthur believed that the dire warnings he had been broadcasting to Yamashita after landing at Leyte would give the Japanese general pause. By February 6, facing mounting casualties, MacArthur purged himself of his grand delusion and ordered his soldiers to use their artillery.

He still forbade tactical bombing. Once the earlier prohibitions against using heavy artillery on important buildings was rescinded, the Sixth Army began applying its full might against the Japanese. As fighting raged from building to building and strongpoint to strongpoint, the battle slowly consumed the city.

Later, Yamashita protested that the naval troops and service units still in Manila were not supposed to be there. During his court-martial, Yamashita testified that even before MacArthur had invested Manila he had given orders for his troops to pull back into the mountains to the north and east. The U. The retreating Japanese left thousands of murdered and mutilated Filipino civilians in their wake. Holed up with them were 4, more civilians who could not escape. Still denied air power by MacArthur, the soldiers resorted to massive doses of artillery to give them the edge.

Inside the walls of the old Spanish city, Japanese soldiers and sailors went on a vindictive rampage, burning and looting indiscriminately. When the last shot had been fired, Intramuros was razed to the ground, as were the stout government buildings where the Japanese had sought final refuge. The carnage MacArthur witnessed was incredible.

Frank Reel. Yamashita owes his place in history entirely to his epoch-making campaign in Malaya which culminated after ten weeks with the capture of Singapore on the 11th February For two and a half years thereafter, during which the fate of Japan was decided, his career was uneventful. Owing to the jealousy of his rivals at Army headquarters in Tokyo, and in particular of the all-powerful General Togo, he was removed from the direction of active operations and sent to command the Japanese forces in garrison in Manchuria.

Yamashita arrived in the Philippines on the 7th October Ten days after his arrival the American landing took place. The charges brought against General Yamashita did not relate to his direction of the Malayan Campaign, although no doubt the resentment felt for the humiliation of the dominant White Race by an upstart people of yellow dwarfs inspired these charges.

Neither was it suggested that he was in any way responsible for the enormities committed during the building of the Burma Road or in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.

The charges related solely to happenings in the Philippines between the 7th October, , and the 3rd September, , when Yamashita on the express command of the Emperor surrendered. There is no dispute concerning the situation which existed in the Philippines when Yamashita took over the command of the 14th Army Group garrisoning this American overseas colonial possession. Most of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Philippines were what was then described by their White rulers as heathen savages, a term which has fallen into disuse as wounding to the susceptibilities of the Afro-Asian bloc in U.

For centuries down to they had waged guerilla warfare against the Spaniards, and for four decades after that against their new American masters. After they continued this struggle, this time against the Japanese invaders and now armed with modem weapons. Their methods of waging guerilla warfare were those which might be expected of heathen savages but which, it must be confessed, were not fundamentally different from those being employed by those Christian peoples of contemporary Europe who were subject to enemy occupations.

Japanese units were ambushed and massacred; prisoners and wounded were tortured and murdered. The Japanese, as might be expected, retaliated with energy and enthusiasm. For two years one horrible atrocity was matched by another; terrorism was met by terrorism.

After years of inconclusive guerilla fighting in China, the Japanese had become accustomed to dealing drastically with partisan irregulars. Like the French ten years later when faced with insurrection in Algeria, the Japanese regularly employed torture when interrogating suspects, burned villages and massacred their inhabitants. This admittedly was the situation in the Philippines which Yamashita found when he arrived there in October He was handicapped from the outset by the fact that he had never even set eyes on the Philippines before, and knew nothing of the inhabitants or the geography of these islands.

He was further handicapped by contradictory and often impossible orders from the Japanese army headquarters in Tokyo, and by the fact that the naval forces and the air force units defending the Philippines were under separate commands. When, ten days after his arrival, the American invasion began, the combined effect of intensive bombing by the American Air Force which held undisputed command of the air and sabotage of the roads and railways by the irregulars, quickly led to Yamashita being completely cut off from most of the units under his command.

In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the discipline of many of the Japanese troops gave way. They defended themselves blindly and savagely. Undeniably horrible atrocities were committed. There is no reason to reject the allegation that 25, unarmed non-combatant civilians were slaughtered. Yamashita was gradually driven back into the mountainous northern end of the island of Luzon.

General Yamashita surrendered on September 3rd. On September 25th he was charged with being a war-criminal: two weeks later he was arraigned and served with an indictment with sixty-four particulars. His trial was fixed for October 29th, so his defenders were given less than three weeks to study this lengthy document and to prepare his defence.

It is thus hardly surprising that Mr. Frank Reel does not hesitate to attribute the refusal of the tribunal to grant proper time to prepare the defence to express orders sent them by General MacArthur, the supreme Military Authority in the Far East, to proceed with the work of liquidating the prisoners without delay.

It was not suggested by the prosecution that General Yamashita had been personally present at any of the numerous atrocities which were committed in various parts of the Philippines between October and September , or that he had ordered or incited their commission. The prosecution maintained that as he was commander-in-chief in the Philippines he was responsible for everything his troops did during the period he commanded them.

He was not convicted of having done anything or ordered or incited anything to be done: he was convicted of failing to do something. Feb 5, Japan. The Japanese were worse than the Germans. When wellingtons troops ran riot at Badajoz he eventually had erected gallows, when they raped and robbed he strung them up. Commanders might be powerless to prevent their troops committing atrocities.

But they can punish it. Lord Oda Nobunaga Ad Honoris. Jan 10, Azuchi Castle. Trial of General Tomoyuki Yamashita "Details as to time, place and date should also be furnished as to the alleged offences and as to the persons who were allegedly permitted to commit them. The Prosecution, however, stressed that, although a motion such as this might be permissible in a court of law, the regulations the Defence was putting forward governing the Commission made no provision for such a motion.

In this instance , it certainly was One could wonder about the many cases of ultimate brutality ordered by Imperial Army commanders , far too few got any form of trouble with the commissions justice was equally missing for the Kenpetai officers or the criminals scientific experiments.

As controversial as it is, because it is associated with the Rape of Nanjing, I would also put forward the trial of Iwane Matsui as being extremely similar. Also attending Yamashita was his own personal interpreter—Masakatsu Hamamoto, a Harvard-educated Japanese army colonel.

Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, facing trial next for his role in the infamous Bataan Death March, spoke English and said he understood the testimony. Both the defense and prosecution had their own translators. However, the accuracy of the interpreters came into question. The trial lasted more than a month, running from a.

Over that time the prosecution presented exhibits—photographs, motion-picture footage, newspaper accounts of atrocities, etc. Pratt and his team of translators listened to testimony from hundreds of people attesting to murder, rape, torture and other outrages committed by Japanese military personnel against Filipino civilians and Allied POWs. The defense team fought back at every cross-examination and argued repeatedly that not a shred of evidence proved Yamashita either ordered any of the atrocities or had any knowledge of them.

When the general took the stand, he explained that after mid-November all communication ceased between his headquarters on Luzon and his troops in the Visayan Islands and on Mindanao, while the pressure of U. The interpreter himself believed Yamashita had not been informed of the brutality of Japanese units in Manila. Flash bulbs popped and newsreel cameras hummed as MPs led Yamashita to the front of the room.

He was directed to stand before Maj. Reynolds, who was seated behind a row of microphones at a long wooden table with his fellow commissioners. Reynolds then paused to allow Yamashita to make a statement, read in English by Hamamoto. Yamashita remained calm and expressionless. Pratt at far right stands beside Yamashita on Dec. Supreme Court for a stay of execution until the court could agree to hear the case.

On December 20 the justices scheduled an oral argument, held on Jan. Unfortunately for Yamashita, on February 4 the court upheld his conviction, though Associate Justices Frank Murphy and Wiley Blount Rutledge wrote vigorous dissenting opinions.

Essentially, Murphy said there was no legal precedent in international law permitting a military commission to find a commander liable for any actions of his troops.

Indeed, the fate of some future president of the United States and his chiefs of staff and military advisers may well have been sealed by this decision. On Feb.