"LESSER BREEDS WITHOUT THE LAW"
THE CASE OF GENERAL YAMASHITA.
By
A. Fronk Reel. University of
Chi cogo Press. $4.00.
On February 23, 1946, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, late
commander of the Japanese Fourteenth Army Group, was executed as
a war criminal. In the final weeks before the Americans captured
Manila, the Japanese defenders had run wild in an orgy of burning, rap–
ing, and killing; thousands of Filipino civilians had been butchered. One
of General MacArthur's first acts after retaking the city was to put on
trial, as responsible for these horrors, the Japanese general then com–
manding in the Philippines-Yamashita.
That generals may be punished for the crimes of their troops is a
legal innovation of the last war. It seems obviously a good one, pro–
vided that the General can be proved to have been (a) in formal
command, and (b) in actual control: so that he knew about the
atrocities and either had ordered them or had not taken steps to halt
them. In the Yamashita case-unlike that of some German generals
similarly tried and convicted-neither of these conditions obtained.
Yamashita, who took over in the Philippines in the fall of 1944, had
withdrawn from Manila all the troops under his command by the end
of January, 1945, except for about sixteen hundred who were left to
guard military supplies. The troops who stayed there, and who com–
mitted the atrocities, were mainly a force of twenty thousand naval
troops, under the command of Admiral Iwabuchi, who refused to
recognize Yamashita's withdrawal order. Furthermore, at the time the
crimes were committed, Yamashita was up in the mountains of Luzon,
cut off from all communication with Manila by the invading American
forces. He was a general on paper only; his "chain of command" was
broken at a dozen points; he had no more control over the Japanese in
Manila than did General MacArthur himself.
*
By the time the city was
retaken, Admiral Iwabuchi and his naval troops were dead. A scape–
goat was necessary
if
MacArthur was to pose as the noble avenger of the
Filipinos; Yamashita was still alive; he was selected. Ironically, he had
been a "moderate" in the Japanese army, opposed to the military ad–
ventures of the expansionist faction led by Tojo. Since the Tojo group
*
Indeed, this was one of the points made
against
him by his military judges:
"That ... you failed to provide effective control of your troops as was required
by circumstances." This reasoning makes MacArthur the guilty one, since it
was his successful strategy that deprived Yamashita of control over the Japanese
troops in Manila!
