Ship of Ghosts (64 page)

If the scale of these numbers does not approach, say, Russian losses in World War II or the number of Jewish victims murdered in the Holocaust, the horror that underlies them matches anything in human annals. When the war was over, a sweeping effort was made to gather evidence and bring to justice those responsible.

The proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far
East began on May 3, 1946, in Tokyo. The indictment brought fifty-five charges against twenty-eight defendants, all of them high-level generals and ministers, including Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. Absent from the indictment was the very figure who seemed to animate Japanese wartime decision making with a divine imperative, Emperor Hirohito himself. Though Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Herbert P. Bix has inferred the emperor’s personal approval behind Japan’s use of poison gas in China, the experimental use of bacteriological weapons in China in 1940, and the annihilation campaigns against Chinese communists in 1941, General MacArthur lobbied that the first grandson of Emperor Meiji be left out of the indictment in order to stabilize the delicate process of postwar reconstruction and reduce the risk that Japan might look to the Soviets for friendship after the war.

With Prime Minister Tojo left as its highest-ranking target, the indictment accused the defendants of conspiring to wage aggressive war and “murdering, maiming, and ill-treating prisoners of war [and] civilian internees…forcing them to labor under inhumane conditions.” Chief U.S. prosecutor Joseph B. Keenan said to the press: “It is high time, and indeed was so before this war began, that the promoters of aggressive, ruthless war and treaty-breakers should be stripped of the glamour of national heroes and exposed as what they really are—plain, ordinary murderers.” The earliest American articulation of the legal-moral basis of Keenan’s vigor had come from Secretary of State Daniel Webster, who said in 1842: “The law of war forbids the wounding, killing, impressments into troops of the country, or the enslaving or otherwise maltreating of prisoners of war, unless they have been guilty of some grave crime; and from the obligations of this law no civilized state can discharge itself.” These principles were codified in the Hague Convention II of 1899 in an annex entitled “Laws and Customs of War on Land,” and supplemented by the Hague Convention IV of 1907, signed by forty-one nations, ratified by twenty-five including Japan. During World War I, in 1917, the U.S. Department of State held that Hague was not contractually binding because all warring nations were not signatories to it, but that “in so far as the rules set forth in the convention are declaratory of international law, they are of course obligatory as being part of the law of nations.” This would be the legal interpretation that made Japan’s calculated refusal to ratify the Geneva Convention of 1929 a moot point.

As the Allied prosecutors argued at Tokyo, Japan had committed itself to the Geneva Convention of 1929 on January 29, 1942, when Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo responded with these words to American and British inquiries on Japan’s intentions: “Japan strictly observes the Geneva Convention of July 27, 1929, relative to the Red Cross, as a signatory of that Convention. The Imperial Government has not yet ratified the Convention relating to the treatment of prisoners of war of 27 July 1929. It is therefore not bound by the said Convention. Nevertheless it will apply
mutatis mutandis
[meaning ‘with suitable or necessary alterations’] the provisions of that Convention to American prisoners of war in its power.” What was a suitable or necessary alteration would be dealt with at trial.

By the time the last of 419 witnesses were heard and judgment made, the trial transcript filled 49,858 pages. The verdict came in the form of a 1,218-page opinion, which was signed by nine of the eleven justices assigned to the tribunal and rendered on November 12, 1948. It sentenced seven defendants to death, sixteen to life imprisonment, and two to shorter prison sentences. Two defendants died during the trial, and one was removed to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. Those condemned to die were dressed in U.S. Army salvage work clothing and hanged on December 23, 1948. These included Prime Minister Tojo and Lt. Gen. Heitaro Kimura, who as chief of the Burma-area Japanese Army in August 1944 approved orders to use Allied prisoners on the railway project.

According to the testimony of Tadakazu Wakamatsu, the head of transportation and communications for the General Staff, the decision to build the railway was made in the summer of 1942 by Chief of Staff Hajime Sugiyama, Minister of War Hideki Tojo, and Vice Minister of War Kimura in response to a request from the Southern Army.

United Press Tokyo war crimes trial correspondent Arnold C. Brackman wrote, “To observers in daily attendance at the tribunal, the prosecution’s evidence always appeared to sink from bad to worse. Whenever I thought we had hit rock bottom of Poe’s indescribable pit, we descended, to our shock, to a lower level of depravity.”

Gen. Ryukichi Tanaka, the former chief of the Military Affairs Bureau, testified that Tojo had ordered “all prisoners of war to engage in forced labor” at a meeting of War Ministry officials in 1942
at Ichigaya, in the very building where the Tokyo tribunal sat. There was British testimony of coolies being forced to wear weights tied to their privates to amuse their captors; Chinese patients had glass rods inserted into their vaginas; “sick coolies were used for the practice of judo and thrown over the shoulders of Japanese.”

On March 26, 1946, Prime Minister Tojo testified under cross-examination: “The Japanese idea about prisoners is very different from that in Europe and America. In Japan, it is regarded as a disgrace [to be captured]. Under Japanese criminal law, anyone who becomes a prisoner while still able to resist has committed a criminal offense, the maximum punishment for which is the death penalty.”

A document from a Japanese agency known as the Central Investigating Committee Concerning Prisoners of War detailed the chain of responsibility on the Death Railway that ran from the NCOs and junior officers who ran the work camps to the Fifth and Ninth Railway Regiments, the Railway Inspection Office, the South General Army, the Imperial General Headquarters, and the Ministry of War itself. Sir Arthur Comyns Carr, the associate prosecutor for the United Kingdom, stretched rhetoric only slightly in calling this unofficial document “the confession of the Japanese Army with regard to the Burma-Siam railway.” If it fell short of that, it certainly at a minimum revealed that Prime Minister Tojo’s high command, and perhaps even the emperor, was in the loop regarding the use of prisoners as slave labor.

Some justice had been meted out privately, by the ex-prisoners themselves, after hostilities ceased. In Saigon, some Australians caught up with a guard who had been particularly cruel on the railroad, killing several of their countrymen in cold blood. They found him in civilian clothes, his distinguishing scar visible on the back of his neck. Afterward, all they would say was, “Well, he ain’t going back to Korea. He’s not going back.”

An American survivor of the Death Railway told an interviewer:

What was done in the jungle stayed in the jungle. More than a few guards who probably deserved it were given railway justice and left to rot. Either the U.S. Army lawyers didn’t like what they were hearing or the Americans didn’t like what they were asking. The Tokyo proceedings featured no American witnesses to the Death Railway atrocities. That work fell to Australians and Britons, notably Lt. Col. John M. Williams, commander of the 2/2 Pioneers, alongside whom the Lost Battalion had fought on Java, Lt. Col. Albert E. Coates, the superb doctor who ran the hospital at 55 Kilo Camp and later the larger one at Nakhon Pathom, and Col. Cyril Wild, a British survivor of F Force and war crimes investigator. They etched into the trial record—and doubtless into the minds of all in attendance—the rank horror of the three-year struggle to survive in the jungle.

While the Tokyo tribunal was the main event, the Pacific counterpart to Nuremberg, a total of 2,200 trials were conducted by U.S., Australian, British, Chinese, Dutch, Filipino, and French authorities in forty-nine locations between the end of the war and April 1956. The proceedings in Manila, Shanghai, Yokohama, Guam, Kwajalein, Rabaul, and elsewhere produced more than 4,300 convictions, 984 death sentences, and 2,519 prison sentences.

The Singapore proceeding, run by the Australian Army, targeted several lower-level commanders of the railway, including Lt. Col. Yoshitada Nagatomo of Branch Three, Maj. Totare Mizutani of Branch Five, and Col. Hirateru Banno, who nominally presided over F Force’s evisceration by disease. The indictment charged Nagatomo with the executions of five Allied prisoners at Thanbyuzayat, as well as the broader accusation, leveled at him and his fourteen co-defendants, of killing and harming prisoners in the construction of the railway.

The voice of a ghost came back to haunt them. It was that of
Brig. Arthur Varley, who had buried his meticulously kept diary in a grave plot at Thanbyuzayat before he left for Singapore to board the
Rakuyo Maru
for his fatal rendezvous with U.S. submarines in Convoy College. Per his instructions, the diary was recovered in July 1946 and entered as evidence at Singapore. Nagatomo’s own famous speech evidently came back to haunt him too.
We will build the railroad if we have to build it over the white man’s body. You are merely rubble…and there will be many of you who will not see your homes again.
Those words spoke for themselves. “Those words hung him,” Lloyd Willey said. At nine
a.m.
on September 16, 1947, at Changi Jail, Colonel Nagatomo swung from the gallows.

A regime was found liable for the acts of its officers. Individual commanders were found liable for the conduct of their underlings. It was the reverse of the U.S. experience in the 1930s Mafia prosecutions, where the bosses went free while the soldiers did time. Reflected in the three dissenting voices on the Tokyo tribunal and in legal commentary that continues to this day, there was no small degree of controversy over the standard of liability used to convict Japanese officers such as General Yamashita, the “Tiger of Malaya,” who was held culpable for the acts of his men. Save Emperor Hirohito himself, as well as any number of unnamed and unknowable individual guards, the men responsible for the ordeal of the Death Railway were dealt with by the long arm of international law.

The question of reparations and individual compensation proved equally tricky and frustrating to the ex-POWs who sought it. The War Claims Act of 1948 created a fund to pay out lump-sum compensation to ex-prisoners of war and civilian internees. From seized and liquidated Axis assets of $228 million, a prisoner was entitled, under the 1952 amendment to the act, to $1 per day if he could prove that the enemy failed to feed him as required by the 1929 Geneva Convention. An additional $1.50 per day was payable if he was subjected to “inhumane treatment.” The full $2.50 per diem stood to bring the average railway survivor a total of about three thousand dollars. If he failed to claim his piece by the statutory deadline, March 31, 1955, he received nothing. The 1951 Multilateral Peace Treaty with Japan, meanwhile, permanently blocked his right to sue for anything more.

The peace treaty repeatedly thwarted lawsuits and legislation aimed at extracting money from either the Japanese government or
its corporations, which, POW advocates say, had been unjustly enriched by the slavery of Japan’s war prisoners. The absence from the Tokyo indictment of corporations such as Mitsubishi, which ran the huge prisoner-staffed shipyard at Nagasaki and sold the crossties that the army used to build the railway, was an outrage to POW groups. It led to the passage by the 107th Congress of the Justice for United States Prisoners of War Act of 2001, which tried to revive World War II–era claims against Japanese nationals that were barred by the 1951 treaty. But since the State Department considered that treaty “the cornerstone of U.S. security policy in the Pacific region,” a position that most courts found persuasive, those suits went nowhere. “A great nation does not repudiate its treaties,” said State Department legal counsel William H. Taft IV at a House hearing on the bill. At a time when a litigation-conscious U.S. Congress was granting individually tailored multimillion-dollar awards to families of victims of Islamic terror attacks, Taft seemed content to require veterans to look to that same body, not overseas private defendants, for recompense, even if in granting a $2.50 per diem to prisoners our legislature had long ago exhibited its essential disinterest in the men who lived and died to build the Death Railway.