American personnel worked closely with nationalist authorities in China, especially in coordinating the movement of witnesses and suspects from Japan to China for Chinese war crimes trials. In Shanghai, American tribunals prepared to conduct their own trials, with the blessing of the Chinese. The defendants in those proceedings were mostly Japanese who had participated in the ‘trial’ and execution of American airmen under something called the ‘Enemy Airmen’s Act,’ promulgated after the surprise and shame of the Doolittle raid on Japan in April 1942.

Most of those trials resulted in convictions and a good number of executions. Still, the commissions had taken pains to ensure a fair trial for the accused and had shown considerable clemency to men who had acted under orders, even in the case of the Doolittle fliers. Obedience to high authority might not be a defense, but at least some of the commissions considered it a matter in mitigation. In the end, the American trials in China ended with about the same number of acquittals as those in the Philippines (10 percent) and many fewer death sentences.

Many American trials were held by the U.S. Navy for crimes committed in the Pacific islands. Three took place on Kwajalein in the Marshalls; 44 were tried on Guam. Many of those proceedings involved close cooperation with British, Australian and Indonesian authorities. In some cases, courts of one nation tried Japanese for offenses against personnel of an ally. The victims of the Japanese included not only Allied personnel but also Swiss, Spanish and many Pacific islanders.

Most of the crimes alleged were personal and ugly. Nineteen Japanese were tried for a series of medical ‘experiments’ at Truk in 1944. The defendants had murdered American prisoners by–among other things–injecting them with streptococcus bacteria. Others clamped tourniquets on prisoners’ arms and legs for seven hours. When these were removed, two prisoners died of shock.

Other notable trials included the prosecution of a rear admiral and others for the murder of 98 Pan American airline employees on Wake Island in 1943. The admiral and 10 more were sentenced to death. Another group of 18 was convicted of murdering civilians in the Palaus, and many others were held accountable for civilian murders in the islands, usually of natives executed as’spies’ on no evidence.

Meanwhile, in Japan, a series of trials continued in Yokohama, the defendants including such disparate persons as Shinto priests, medical personnel, professors and farmers, in addition to military personnel of all ranks. Most of those proceedings involved maltreatment of prisoners, a bitter litany of starvation, beating and general neglect that caused thousands of deaths.

One case involved the notorious ‘hell ship’ Oryoko Maru, on which some 1,300 prisoners died en route from the Philippines to Japan in 1944. The guard commander was sentenced to death, as was his interpreter, and four others were sent to prison. Significantly, the commission acquitted the ship captain, ruling that he had no power to intervene.

Particular targets of American prosecutions were members of the Kempeitai, the secret police, famous for its brutality and arrogance. Fatal beatings, beheadings, even poisonings of prisoners, were commonplace in the cells of this detested organization. Just as loathsome were the crimes of Japanese medical personnel who had murdered American prisoners by, as one angry indictment put it, ‘vivisecting them, mutilating and dissecting and removing parts from and otherwise desecrating the bodies of said prisoners.’ One medical defendant was the first woman to be tried by the commissions, an army nurse accused of participating in sadistic medical experiments.

Many of the crimes alleged against ex-servicemen were committed out of pure revenge, and for these defendants American tribunals had little mercy. Five Japanese seamen got life sentences for the murder of five Americans at sea in 1942. The accused had told the American victims that because they had killed ‘many Japanese soldiers on Wake Island…you are now going to be killed for revenge.’

One case begun in Japan finished in America, the trial of one Tomaya Kawakita, who argued that because he was born in the United States and was therefore a citizen, he was entitled to trial before an American civilian court. A military commission in Yokohama agreed with him, but sometimes it is better not to get what you wish for. Returned to Los Angeles, Kawakita got his trial before an American court…and was sentenced to death.

The British commander in the Far East, Lord Louis Mountbatten, made it clear from the start that war crimes trials would be straightforward criminal matters. Britain would have nothing to do, he said, ‘with trials of a purely political nature.’ Conviction would be only by proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And, as one British prosecutor announced to his court, the trials should ‘demonstrate to the world that great distinction’ between British and Japanese justice.

And so they did. British prosecutors tried accused Japanese all across the East–up and down the Malay Peninsula, in Borneo, New Britain, Rangoon and Singapore. British concern for fairness did not, however, imply any special leniency as to sentence. One trial of 35 Kempeitai for murders of Malay civilians produced 21 death sentences. A second trial of Kempeitai produced eight more sentences to the gallows, this time for torture of British prisoners.

Some British trials attracted special attention, like the American prosecutions of the Japanese who had brutalized and murdered American airmen after the Doolittle raid. The most notable of the British proceedings was the prosecution of the ‘River Kwai’ defendants, the men responsible for the deaths of almost 600 of the 2,000 prisoners who built the Burma­Siam railroad. After hearing days of ghastly evidence from survivors of the deadly railroad, the British court sentenced two of the worst offenders to hang, the others to long terms in prison.

British defense counsel was generally able and dedicated and made much use of the’superior orders’ defense. The Japanese social and military order was, they argued, dominated by the idea of absolute obedience to orders at all levels. And sometimes the plea worked. Like their American counterparts, British courts could also show mercy. One Japanese sergeant was convicted of brutality toward a British prisoner. However, since the evidence showed that the man had beaten his victim only under threat of punishment by his superior, the British court sentenced the Japanese soldier to a single day’s confinement.

Like the British and Americans, Australia’s courts were determined that justice not only be done fairly but also be perceived as fairly done. Unlike the other nations, however, the Australians compiled a detailed war crimes list of 35 separate offenses. It included ‘crimes against peace,’ of course, but also a litany of particular offenses including not only conventional crimes but also the unusual and the bizarre, such as ‘cannibalism’ and ‘mutilation of a dead body.’ It was as well that Australia itemized such grotesque crimes, for that country would have to try them.

Depending on where trials were held, the Australians relied considerably on their allies. Offenses against Australians were tried by both British and American courts, sitting with an Australian member; sometimes Australian officers prosecuted before these Allied courts. The British, Chinese and Indians furnished officers to sit on Australian courts trying offenses against their own countrymen.

Perhaps more than any other, the Australian trials revealed the depths of depravity to which the Japanese sometimes sank. One trial on New Guinea condemned a Japanese officer who ate part of an Australian prisoner. Unimpressed by the defendant’s claim that starvation had deprived him of his sense, the Australians hanged him. Another court convicted a defendant of crucifying four airmen, including one American, in the Celebes.

The Australians put on the largest trial of the entire postwar period, accusing 93 Japanese together with cruelty to American, Australian and Dutch prisoners in Amboina. And in Rabaul, New Britain, for most of the war a large Japanese base, an Australian court heard a hideous tale of calculated ill treatment of about 1,000 American and British prisoners of war. Ill, malnourished, mistreated, these men were driven 165 miles over very bad terrain. Only 183 survived the trip, and 150 of those died soon after arrival. The Japanese commander executed the survivors and survived the war himself. He did not survive the court’s verdict.

China tried more than 800 defendants of whom there is record, including some of those responsible for the butchery in Nanking and Shanghai. Of the 800, some 500 were convicted. Of those, 149 were put to death. France and the Netherlands tried several hundred more. The French were still at it in 1951. Generally, the proceedings followed the same pattern set by the other trials, and like the other powers, France tried Japanese for offenses against Allied personnel as well as their own. And, like the other nations, the French tried many offenses against the civilian population, including some unusual crimes, like the Japanese civilian on Java who forced dozens of women into prostitution for the military authorities. He had acted only under orders, pleaded the defendant. It cost him 10 years.

In one of the ugliest trials in the Dutch East Indies a court condemned to death Vice Admiral Michiaki Kamada, who had directed the execution of some 1,500 natives of Borneo. Another four Japanese died for brutality and murder committed on 2,000 Dutch prisoners on Flores Island. Another case involved the death ‘through maltreatment’ of 5,000 Indonesian forced laborers, 500 Allied prisoners and 1,000 civilians.

Although Japanese defendants regularly pleaded not guilty, from time to time some of them admitted the fearful things with which they were accused. One prison camp commander admitted he had gouged eyes and tortured prisoners. A Kempeitai officer was even moved to demonstrate how he had kicked a prisoner. Although the defendant claimed that his blows caused no harm, the scars on the wooden courtroom table he had kicked cost him five years in prison.

The French, who tried fewer cases than anybody else, quite practically approached most of their cases as trials of ordinary crimes. Prominent among the defendants were members of the vile Kempeitai, charged with hundreds of incidents of murder and torture of both French and Vietnamese prisoners. And, like the British, the French helped American war crimes teams seeking Japanese who had brutalized Americans. Five Japanese were executed for the murder of American airmen in Indochina, thanks to the assistance of the French.

The Russian trials were mostly pulpits for propaganda attacks on the West. The ‘imperialist policy’ of their erstwhile allies, said the Russians, had led them to abandon ‘the struggle against war criminals.’ The Russians never tired of harping on Western decisions not to try the ‘greedy capitalists,’ the zaibatsu of Japanese industry.

The thrust of the Russian trials, such as they were, concentrated on alleged Japanese ‘manufacture and employment’ of bacteriological weapons (of which the International Military Tribunal found no evidence at all). The Japanese had started these preparations as early as 1935, the Russians claimed, bred fleas to carry plague, and manufactured shells and bombs to spread contamination. Moreover, said the Russian prosecution, the Japanese had experimented on human guinea pigs and actually used bacteria in China between 1940 and 1942. Naturally, the zaibatsu were at the bottom of all these nefarious doings.

The Russian ‘defense,’ outdoing the prosecution in the production of sanctimonious claptrap, excused the participation of ordinary Japanese soldiers as due to a sort of arrested development. The accused had not had the advantages of those fortunate enough to live ‘under the sun of the Stalin Constitution.’ The Western press was excluded from these otherwise ‘public’ trials for obvious reasons, but the tame Communist media let the world know that ‘Japan and its American allies’ were plotting to use such hideous weapons against Russia.

Later, of course, they followed up with the nonsense that such weapons were actually used against North Korea and China. The West had ‘unleashed the most inhuman carnage in history, warfare with the assistance of microbes, fleas, lice and spiders….’ And on and on.

By 1951 it was over. No doubt the justice meted out to a variety of criminals was important, but not nearly so important as the demonstration that the victorious West would deal fairly with its prostrate enemy, no matter how vile the crimes it had committed. A great many Japanese, including many of the accused, later commented on the fairness of the trials and the length to which the victorious powers went to provide and assist the defense.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Murphy accurately summed up the great danger the Allies had successfully faced in the Far Eastern trials, speaking in his powerful and vigorous dissent in In re Yamashita. Justice had to be preserved, he wrote, no matter what the cost, no matter what guilty men went free. ‘To conclude otherwise,’ he continued, ‘is to admit that the enemy has lost the battle but has destroyed our ideals.’

The enemy had lost both battles.

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This article was written by Robert Barr Smith and originally appeared in the September 1996 issue of World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!

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