The 7th of December, 1941. 7:55 AM. The first of two waves of
Japanese naval aircraft launched from six aircraft carriers attack Pearl Harbor,
catching the US forces completely by surprise. While the attack costs only 29 Japanese planes,
two thousand four hundred US sailors and soldiers are killed and 1,200 are wounded.
Over half of the military aircraft are damaged or destroyed, almost all of which
were grounded at the time. One day later on the 8th of December, the Japanese launch the
invasion of the Philippines and the US and the Philippine Armies finally surrender in May 1942.
More than 2 years later in October 1944, American forces begin retaking the Philippines from
Japanese troops which are led by Military Governor whose units committed unspeakable
atrocities there as well as on the island of Singapore. His name is Tomoyuki Yamashita.
Tomoyuki Yamashita, the second son of a local doctor,
was born on the 8 November 1885 in a village named Osugi located on the island of Shikoku.
In November 1905, at the age of 20, Yamashita graduated from the 18th class
of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy. He was ranked 16th out of 920 cadets.
The First World War began on the 28th of July 1914. During the war, Yamashita fought against
the German Empire in Chinese Shandong and in 1916 he was promoted to captain. The same
year he married a daughter of retired general and became an expert on Germany, serving as assistant
military attaché at Bern and Berlin from 1919 to 1922. He then returned to Japan but after falling
into disfavor as a result of his involvement with political factions within the Japanese military,
from 1927 until 1930 Yamashita was posted as a military attaché to Vienna in Austria.
After the February 26 Incident of 1936, which was an attempted coup d'état in the Empire of
Japan organized by a group of young Imperial Japanese Army officers with the goal of purging
the government and military leadership of their factional rivals and ideological opponents,
Yamashita fell into disfavor with Emperor Hirohito due to his appeal for leniency
toward rebel officers involved in the attempted coup. He was eventually relegated to a post in
Korea and one year later in November 1937 he was promoted to lieutenant-general.
At this time Japan was in war with China. Japanese territorial expansion in East Asia
began in 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria and continued in 1937 with a brutal attack on China.
Yamashita insisted that Japan should end the conflict with
China and keep peaceful relations with the United States and Great Britain,
but he was ignored and subsequently assigned to an unimportant post.
Between 1938 and 1940, Yamashita was assigned to command the infantry Division which saw some
action in northern China against insurgents fighting the occupying Japanese armies.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
On September 27, 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy,
thus entering the military alliance known as the "Axis."
In December 1940 Yamashita was sent on a six-month clandestine military mission to Germany and Italy.
Weeks after arriving in Germany, Yamashita was presented to Adolf Hitler. While Hitler intended
to pressure the Japanese military into declaring war on Britain and the United States, Yamashita,
facing the wrath of Russia and the ongoing costs of Japan’s war on China, had no interest. Instead,
he hoped to inspect Germany’s military techniques and improve Japan’s own prospects at war.
In private, Yamashita was disappointed with the Führer. He told staff, “He can be a great speaker
on a platform, but standing behind his desk listening, he looks a lot more like a clerk.”
On 6 November 1941 Yamashita was put in command of the Twenty-Fifth Army with which on 8 December
he launched an invasion of Malaya from bases in French Indochina. Because the Japanese force was
about one-third as large as the opposing British forces in Malaya and Singapore,
Yamashita remarked that only a "driving charge" would ensure victory in Malaya. The
plan was to conquer Malaya and Singapore in the shortest time possible in order to overcome any
numerical disadvantage, as well as to minimize any potential losses from a long, drawn-out battle.
The Malayan campaign concluded with the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942,
in which Yamashita's 30,000 front-line soldiers captured 80,000 British,
Indian and Australian troops, the largest surrender of British-led personnel in
history. After this victory, Yamashita became known as the "Tiger of Malaya".
The British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the ignominious fall of Singapore to
Japan the "worst disaster" and "largest capitulation" in British military history.
The campaign and the subsequent Japanese occupation of Singapore
included war crimes committed against captive Allied personnel and civilians.
One such massacre occurred at the Alexandra British Military Hospital in Singapore when
on 14 February 1942 at about 1 PM, the Japanese broke through and advanced towards the hospital
which was caught between the advancing Japanese troops and the retreating British forces. A
British lieutenant—acting as an envoy with a white flag—approached Japanese forces but was killed
with a bayonet. After Japanese troops entered the hospital, they killed up to 50 soldiers,
including some undergoing surgery. Doctors and nurses were also killed. The next day,
about 200 male staff members and patients who had been assembled and bound the previous day,
many of them walking wounded, were ordered to walk about 400 m to an industrial area.
Those who fell on the way were bayoneted. The men were forced into a series of small, badly
ventilated rooms where they were held overnight without water. Some died during the night as a
result of their treatment and the remainder were killed with bayonet the following morning. Several
survivors were identified after the war, some of whom had survived by pretending to be dead.
Another massacre occurred on the 18th February 1942, four days after the Japanese
officially conquered Singapore. The Imperial Japanese Army with the help of the Kempeitai
– Japanese secret police - began a genocide of the Chinese people there which became known as
the Sook Ching Massacre. In Chinese, Sook Ching means “to purge through cleansing.”
The purge, which was only meant to last two days but was extended for more than a week,
finally ended on 4th of March. Some experts estimate that 10 to
20 percent of the entire Chinese population in Singapore were killed during the mass murder,
devastating the overall population. The death toll ranges between about 25,000 to 50,000.
These atrocities were committed by soldiers under Yamashita’s command.
On 17 July 1942, he was again reassigned from Singapore to far-away Manchukuo
which was a puppet state of the Empire of Japan in Manchuria from 1932 until 1945,
having been given a post in commanding the First Area Army, and was effectively
sidelined for a major part of the Pacific War. It is thought that general Hideki Tojo,
by then the Prime Minister, was responsible for his banishment, taking advantage of
Yamashita's gaffe during a speech made to Singaporean civilian leaders in early 1942,
when he referred to the local populace as "citizens of the Empire of Japan". This
was considered embarrassing for the Japanese government, who officially did not consider the
residents of occupied territories to have the rights or privileges of Japanese citizenship.
Despite this, in February 1943 Yamashita was promoted to full general. Some have
suggested that he may have been sent there to prepare for an attack on the
Soviet Union in the event that Stalingrad fell to Germany. However this never never happened.
On 26 September 1944, when the war situation was critical for Japan,
Yamashita was rescued from his enforced exile in China by the new Japanese government after
the downfall of Hideki Tōjō and his cabinet, and he assumed the command of the Fourteenth
Area Army to defend the occupied Philippines on 10 October. Yamashita commanded approximately 262,000
troops in three defensive groups. He tried to rebuild his army but was
forced to retreat from Manila - the capital of the Philippines - to the mountains. Yamashita
ordered all troops, except those given the task of ensuring security, out of the city.
Soon, another massacre followed. In order to prevent the rescue of
prisoners of war by the advancing Allies, on 14 December 1944 near the city of Puerto Princesa in
the Philippine province of Palawan, units of the Japanese Fourteenth Area Army under the command
of General Yamashita, brought the prisoners of war back to their own camp. After an air raid
warning was sounded to get the prisoners into the shelter trenches, the 150 prisoners of war entered
those trenches, and the Japanese soldiers set them on fire using barrels of gasoline.
Prisoners who tried to escape the flames were shot down by machine gun fire. Others
attempted to escape by climbing over a cliff that ran along one side of the trenches,
but were later hunted down and killed. Only 11 men escaped the slaughter and 139
were killed. This atrocity became known as the Palawan massacre.
While evacuating most of his soldiers, Yamashita, who also served as the governor-general and
military governor of the Philippines, did not declare Manila an open city. When a military
commander or political leader formally declares an open city this means that the defending military
will not defend the city in battle and the victorious forces can enter unopposed. In
addition, open city declaration saves civilian lives and guarantees no destruction of buildings.
During the evacuation of Yamashita’s soldiers, Japanese Navy Rear,
Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi re-occupied Manila with 16,000 sailors, with the intent of destroying
all port facilities and naval storehouses. Once there, Iwabuchi took command of the
3,750 Army security troops, and against Yamashita's specific order, turned the
city into an open battlefield. The battle and the Japanese atrocities resulted in the deaths
of more than 100,000 Filipino civilians, in what became known as the Manila massacre,
during the fierce street fighting for the capital which raged between 4 February and 3 March 1945.
Yamashita was able to hold on to part of Luzon, the largest and most populous
island in the Philippines as well as home to the country’s capital Manila,
until after the formal Surrender of Japan in August 1945. At the time of his surrender,
his forces had been reduced to under 50,000 by the lack of supplies and tough campaigning by
elements of the combined American and Filipino soldiers including the recognized guerrillas.
Justice finally caught up with Yamashita when from 29 October to 7 December 1945,
an American military tribunal in Manila tried him for war crimes relating to the Manila massacre
and many atrocities in the Philippines against civilians and prisoners of war.
For his part Yamashita denied he had knowledge of the crimes committed by his men and claimed
that he would have harshly punished them if he had had that knowledge. Further, he argued that with
an army as large as his, there was no way for him to control all actions by all his subordinates.
As such he felt that what he was really being charged with was losing the war.
However, evidence that Yamashita did not have ultimate command
responsibility over all military units in the Philippines was not admitted in
court which found Yamashita guilty as charged and sentenced him to death.
Following the Supreme Court decision, an appeal for clemency was made to U.S.
President Harry S. Truman, who declined to intervene.
Tomoyuki Yamashita was 60 years old when he was
hanged on 23 February 1946 at Los Baños Prison Camp, 30 miles south of Manila.
The ruling against Yamashita set a precedent, called command responsibility or the Yamashita
standard, in that a commander can be held accountable before the law for the crimes
committed by his troops even if he did not order them, didn't stand by to allow them,
or possibly even know about them or have the means to stop them.
There were no tears shed for Tomoyuki Yamashita.
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