Tears in the Darkness (60 page)

On January 21 the prosecution finished its case, and the court recessed for a week to give the defense time to prepare its witnesses. The plan was to divide the defense witnesses into two groups. The first would try to answer the charges; the second would testify to the defendant's good character. People who knew him well, old friends and comrades and family too—his wife, Fukjiko.

Homma had been dead set against her appearing. He did not want
her pilloried in the press or on the witness stand, but his lawyers, short on time and effective witnesses, had insisted. They needed her, they told him, and, judging from his hangdog demeanor, so did he.

 

FUJIKO
had arrived on a Sunday in the early morning dark. The next day, Bob Pelz, Frank Coder, and George Furness paid her a courtesy call. She gave each attorney a small gift, a token of thanks for defending her husband. They were instantly enchanted. “A charming lady,” Pelz wrote, “she seems to carry her load beautifully.”

On Wednesday, the defense trotted her out for photographers. “She makes a wonderful impression wherever she goes,” Bob Pelz thought, “so graceful and charming is she.” And on Saturday, she sat for a press conference. Through an interpreter she told reporters how she'd been married for twenty years and had two children, a daughter and son, eighteen and sixteen years old, respectively. Then she answered a few questions about her husband. She described him as a quiet, almost bookish man who enjoyed the plays of John Galsworthy and George Bernard Shaw. His favorite novel, she volunteered, was by an American named Margaret Mitchell,
Gone With the Wind
. When she was done she smiled, bowed slightly, retired with the attorneys in tow. A real “Japanese lady,”
Time
magazine said.
²⁷

The army ensconced her in the nurses' quarters at a local hospital, a nice room with a high, Western-style bed, a dresser, makeup table, nightstand, and chair. Accustomed to rationing and shortages, she found the food “extravagant,” and remembering that her family was going without rice in destitute Tokyo, she felt “suddenly . . . shameful” eating her dinner.

Skeen had promised she could visit her husband regularly, and the morning after she arrived the lawyer came to fetch her.

“I will try to let you see him as much as possible,” Skeen said. “Please just follow the regulations.”

“Of course,” she said.

“When I say ‘regulations,' they are not complicated. For example, weapons are forbidden, but since this does not seem to be within the realm of the manners of the Japanese, I suppose it won't be a problem.”

She appreciated the American's sense of humor. A while later a staff car carried her to the residence of the former high commissioner. Downstairs she was introduced to Marshall Williams, a captain of the military
police who would be monitoring her meeting with her husband. Captain Williams led her upstairs and across a hallway to the door of what appeared to be an old storage room. The room had two sleeping cots against the wall. Her husband was standing there in a dark business suit, waiting. He looked spent, and when he saw her, his Fu-san, he started to cry.

They went downstairs to the library, and with Captain Williams standing off to the side they sat down and talked. Masaharu was nervous at first, his heart pounding against his chest. After a few minutes the sound of his wife's voice began to soothe and calm him, and he could feel his fear falling away.

In the days that followed, husband and wife were allowed to meet often. A member of the defense staff would drive Fujiko over to the residence, and as soon as she entered the great front hall, Captain Williams would greet her and shout up to the second floor, “Your wife is here to see you.” Then she would hear footfalls on the stairs and her husband would come down with a bright expression on his face.

Each meeting lasted about thirty minutes. She wanted to stay longer, and could have; Skeen had asked Williams to give the couple more time, but the general, watching the clock, always rose to end their meeting exactly on the half hour.

“You should go now,” he would say to her, rather formally. “We must not take advantage of Mr. Williams's kindness. He is taking time away from his own rest period to come here to watch over us.”

Then, as he turned to go, he would always say the same thing to his jailer. “Please look after my wife.”

 

IN ALL THEY MET EIGHT TIMES
. At each meeting he wanted to talk about what should happen when he was gone—the arrangements for his funeral, the children's future, his aging mother's comfort, and the like. She did not.

“It's all right,” she would say, whenever he tried to broach the subject. “We will still be able to eat meals together soon.”
²⁸

After a while, he gave up trying to get her to talk about what would happen when he was gone and decided to put what he wanted to say on paper.

[
Homma, letter, “The State of My Mind on January 24”
] I find my mind strangely calm. It may be resignation if it had to be explained. Since I
saw the face of my wife and read letters from my children, I have come to feel an extremely transcendental feeling over life and death . . . I have seen the person I wanted to see . . . In my wife's hands I can leave my mother and the future of my children with no worry.

 

[
“To My Wife, January 25”
] In 20 years of our married life, we've had many differences of opinion. Those quarrels have now become sweet memories . . . Twenty years feels short but it is long. I am content that we have lived a happy life together.

If there is what is called the other world, we'll be married again there. I'll go first and wait for you there, but you mustn't hurry. Live as long as you can for the children and do things I haven't been able to do, for me. You will see our grandchildren or great grandchildren and tell me all about them when we meet again in the other world. Thank you very much for everything . . . With endless regret I part with you.
²⁹

 

NONE OF HOMMA'S ATTORNEYS
expected to win the case, but it was clear they were making progress with at least two of the five judges—Brigadier General Arthur G. Trudeau and Major General Basilio J. Valdes of the Philippine Army. Perhaps one or both could be swayed to spare the defendant's life.

In his opening statement on Monday, January 28, chief defense attorney John Skeen laid out his case. He began by depicting Homma as an outsider in his own army. Then he contended that the general was ill served by officers who had ignored his instructions and had not kept him informed, this while the general was preoccupied with the “bitter campaign” to finish the fight in the Philippines, a job that made it “impossible to direct his full attention” to administration or oversight, particularly of the garrison units responsible for moving the prisoners of war.
³⁰

The prosecution had been unable to link the defendant directly to the death march, the centerpiece horror of the government's case. It could produce no evidence whatsoever—no documents or testimony—that Homma had either ordered the bloody atrocities that took place on the Old National Road or that he had been told about the slaughter and had failed to stop it. Instead, prosecutors had relied on circumstantial evidence and the power of inference. Now the defense had to counter those inferences, and Homma's lawyers could think of only two lines of attack.

They could establish their client's ignorance—try to prove he did not know what his men were doing—or they could shift the responsibility for the crime to someone else. As it turned out, they tried both tacks. The first involved them in a conundrum; the second had them chasing a ghost.

The defense began by calling as witnesses several of Homma's staff officers, men who, presumably, could show that Homma was unaware of the events taking place on the Old National Road. Homma had suggested the names to his attorneys. He had also warned them that his men might lie.

Lieutenant General Takeji Wachi took the stand first. “A sinister-looking little man,”
The New York Times
described him. Wachi said Homma had issued orders to all unit commanders to treat prisoners of war with a “friendly spirit and not to mistreat them.” Then he testified that he had been on the Old National Road five times on various errands during the two weeks of the death march and had seen soldiers falling along the wayside. “What action did you take?” he was asked. The Japanese put the sick men on trucks, Wachi said, and when there were no trucks coming by, “I had the Japanese soldiers give a hand and carry these prisoners to a place such as beneath the eaves of a building and place them down there.”
³¹

Guards helping prisoners into the shade? Trucks pulling over to give them a ride?

 

Q: Did you see any dead bodies along the road there?

A: No, none at all, none at all.

Q: Were you ever informed of any atrocities committed by the Japanese Army against prisoners of war during the march? . . .

A: No, I have never heard of it . . .

Q: Did you ever receive any report of any deaths of prisoners on that march? . . .

A: I heard later that there were some who died.

Q: About how many?

A: I don't remember the number but it wasn't many.

Q: Was any report made to you as chief of staff of the execution of prisoners?

A: I found no cases of executions.
³²

 

And so it went, one incredible assertion after another. Major Moriya Wada, who had been assigned to work with the supply and transportation section, the units whose soldiers acted as guards on the death march, told the court that he had seen only five dead along the road. When his superior, a colonel in the transportation section, heard of these corpses, he ordered his staff “to inspect the dead closely and bury them.”

 

Wada: As a result of this order, around the 20th of April the report came in that the men who died along the road between Balanga and San Fernando died because of sickness.

Q: Did the report state how many they had buried along the road?

A: Yes.

Q: How many?

A: They reported that there were approximately 18 bodies between the IIth [of April] and the 18th.
³³

 

The pat answers and apparent fictions were obvious to almost everyone. Even the most untutored courtroom observer could see that after more than two thousand pages of prosecution testimony, there was no denying the death march, no denying the hundreds of bodies by the road or the scars being counted by the judges. So why did the witnesses lie? Because “we live in an age of terror,” Homma told his attorneys in private. If his men had admitted that they had ill served their commander by insulating him from the grim actualities of the march—failing to report what they were being told about the atrocities, or misrepresenting what they had seen firsthand driving the road—they knew they would likely find themselves on trial along with their chief.

 

SO THE DEFENSE TRIED
a second tack. It sought to show the defendant as a commander whose authority, especially his control over his troops, was undermined by the handful of interlopers from Tokyo and Saigon dispatched by headquarters to “advise” the general, in effect agents his political enemies had sent to eavesdrop and interfere in his command.

Foremost among these was a name the defense discovered during pretrial interviews: Masanobu Tsuji, a forty-year-old lieutenant colonel on the Imperial General Staff in Tokyo whose specialty was operations and intelligence, mass murder, and political chaos.

In an army of ultraconservatives, Tsuji was among the most arch, an intriguer who apparently knew no bounds. He believed his country was fighting a race war, and he hated whites (save Germans and Italians, Japan's Axis partners) and any Asians allied with them. “We must, at the very least, beat these Westerners into submission . . . with no thought of leniency,” he wrote in a monograph widely circulated in the Imperial Army. In early April 1942, several days before Homma launched his second offensive on Bataan, Masanobu Tsuji appeared unannounced in Manila. He told Homma's staff that he had been sent as a “liaison” from Tokyo. Then he got into a car and set out for various field headquarters on Bataan, collaring division and regimental commanders and issuing strange and frightening orders.
³⁴

Wachi testified that Tsuji had tried to bully division commanders in the field into following his suggestion to “mete out . . . severe treatment” to prisoners of war.

 

Q: What did you mean by “severe treatment”?

A: It means to kill.
³⁵

 

Here was the villain the defense had been looking for, a real war criminal, Tokyo's agent provocateur urging Homma's field commanders to order their troops to molest and murder unarmed American prisoners of war, those
keto
, hairy white beasts.

The problem was, Tsuji was nowhere to be found, no record of his death, no reports of his person. Just the testimony of Homma's staff officers, witnesses whose credibility was obviously in question. (Years later, other staff officers would come forward to talk about the homicidal colonel, among them Lieutenant General Takeo Imai, at the time commander of the 141st Infantry Regiment on Bataan. Imai said Tsuji told him, “Kill all your prisoners,” but Imai refused to act without written orders, and a few days later, the enigmatic Colonel Tsuji was gone.)
³⁶

 

DESPITE THE REALITIES
of the trial and the weaknesses in the defense case, Bob Pelz still hoped his client might escape the rope. “Maj. Gen. Valdes [one of the five judges] . . . has been tremendously impressed by Homma's obviously sincere emotions during this trial,” the attorney wrote in his diary. “Valdes says he has not slept for three nights because of the trial. Despite the killings of some in his family by Japs, despite
everything, he does not want to hang a man who could not control these troops in their actions . . . I wonder if any American generals have this sensitivity.”