PersonalityThe ‘Tiger of Malaya,’ General Tomoyuki Yamashita, was hanged near Manila in retribution for Japanese war crimes.

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By Nat Helms

In measured steps a column of five men enters the screened enclosure concealing the hangman’s noose. The officer in command gives a terse order, and the somber group halts. More commands are given, and the execution detail moves toward the brightly lit gallows.

One man catches all eyes, the central figure whose hands are bound in front as he approaches the gallows steps. He is the first of three Japanese soldiers sentenced to die this morning. The condemned man is dressed in the plain garb of a private soldier, stripped of “decorations and other appurtenances signifying membership in the military profession,” by personal order of General of the U.S. Army Douglas MacArthur. At his side is a Buddhist priest.

Waiting at the top of the gallows is Lieutenant Charles Raroad, a military police officer charged with executing the condemned. “The stage was set under a tropical star-studded sky,” Raroad wrote just hours later. “The stars, usually so warm and friendly, seem gradually to lose their warmth and assume the air of dignified judges turned stern witness.”

At the top of the gallows stairs the executioner steps aside to let pass 61-year-old Lt. Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita. Nothing about him suggests he is the same “Tiger of Malaya” whose troops rampaged through the South Pacific early in the war. Raroad later called him a “heavy, squat, yellow-visaged figure that seemed calm and stoic about his impending doom.”

Twelve days before this day of execution, MacArthur denied the Japanese general’s final appeal. “It is not easy for me to pass penal judgment upon a defeated adversary in a major campaign,” MacArthur wrote in his terse, four-paragraph decision. “I have reviewed the proceedings in vain search for some mitigating circumstance on his behalf. I can find none.” And so now Raroad prepares Yamashita’s passage, working with quick, confident movements. First Raroad places leather straps around Yamashita’s arms and legs, followed by a black hood over his head. Finally, Raroad drops the noose around Yamashita’s thick neck, “the bulging knot pulled taut under the left ear.”

Now the stillness is interrupted, “hardly broken,” Raroad later wrote, by the high-pitched chant of the Buddhist priest who stands in front of the trussed figure. The priest’s words gradually fade as Raroad prepares to speak. He pauses and then asks, “Have you any last words to say?”

There is a brief, muffled reply from Yamashita: “I will pray for the Japanese emperor and the emperor’s family, and national prosperity. Dear father and mother I am going to your side. Please educate well my children.” Then, the condemned man nods, and Raroad looks around a final time to, as he later wrote, “gather strength and control.” The knife blade in Raroad’s hand flashes momentarily in the bright, yellow light as he quickly draws it down across the counterweight holding the rope. Immediately the silence is shattered by one rasping shriek as the retaining bolts of the trap door pull free. The figure standing before Raroad plummets down, only to be arrested with a sharp jerk after a 6-foot fall. It is 3:02 a.m., February 23, 1946, at the Philippine Detention and Rehabilitation Center near Manila, and the Tiger of Malaya is dead.

“The General died before dawn,” proclaimed the next day’s Pacifican, as the Pacific Stars & Stripes was called in the Western Pacific. “Executioner Lieutenant Charles Raroad sent Yamashita to join his ancestors.”

It was an ignominious end for one of Japan’s greatest soldiers. Yamashita began his military career in 1916, after graduating with honors from the Japanese War College. During the interwar years he served in many influential posts in the army, including staff, command and attaché duties in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. In 1937 he was posted to Korea, where he commanded an infantry brigade.

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