Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  For MacArthur, what happened in Manila in 1945, and what had happened there three years earlier when he had been driven out by the Japanese Imperial Army under General Homma Masaharu, was a personal affront. So the trials held against both Homma and Yamashita in Manila were rather personal too. Orders came from Washington to arrange for speedy trials, following decisions made by the Allies in June 1945 to prosecute war criminals. But they were to be held by military commissions under MacArthur’s command. The judges were appointed by MacArthur, and the procedures were managed by MacArthur. This left many people who were there with the distinct impression that these were not trials to still the fires of vengeance; they were a form of vengeance.

  Someone had to pay for the heinous crimes in Manila, as well as other brutalities perpetrated under Japanese occupation: the Bataan Death March in April 1942, the starving of POWs, the destruction of Filipino villages and towns, the torture prisons under the Kempeitai. Since the collaborators in the Filipino elite were largely shielded from prosecution, and the most active Filipino resisters were being crushed in the name of anticommunism, a villain was badly needed to show Filipinos, who had suffered so much, that justice was still being done; a brutal face had to be matched to the nameless mass of killers. Someone had to hang.

  Yamashita Tomoyuki certainly looked the part: a squat, bullnecked figure with narrow, myopic eyes, his was the cartoon image of the Japanese war criminal. Filipinos were encouraged to come and watch him being tried in the old High Commissioner’s residence. One old woman was so embittered by her wartime experiences that she carried rocks in her purse to throw at the monstrous Japanese general. And some American reporters did their best to condemn him before he was convicted. As the trial reporter for Yank put it nicely: “From the very beginning of the proceedings, you couldn’t find a sucker to bet two pesos to 200 on Yamashita’s acquittal.”15

  Yank continued: “In the bullet-scarred High Commissioner’s office, where he once ruled as a conqueror, general Yamashita stood before a tribunal of five as a war criminal. He was receiving a fair trial, according to law—something the general hadn’t bothered to give his victims.”

  This is almost entirely wrong. Yamashita had never been in the High Commissioner’s office before and certainly not as a conqueror. He arrived in the Philippines for the first time just before MacArthur waded ashore in the Leyte Gulf. Defending the country was by then a hopeless cause. Yamashita didn’t know the terrain. The chain of command was in tatters. His troops were scattered all over the Philippine islands. Communications had been largely cut. Food was no longer getting to most soldiers roaming in the mountains. Gasoline was barely available. Troops were badly trained and demoralized by hunger, exhaustion, and the tropical climate. Harassed by Filipino guerrillas and overwhelmed by superior U.S. forces, Yamashita had no chance to even see his troops, let alone lead them as a conqueror.

  The Manila Massacre was at least partly the result of Japanese disarray. Yamashita’s headquarters were in the mountains almost two hundred miles from Manila. Knowing that he could not defend the capital, he ordered all Japanese troops to withdraw, including the marines who were nominally under his command. Manila would be an open city, with only sixteen hundred soldiers left behind to guard military supplies. But naval commanders dithered. Some wanted to fight to the last man. Others talked about a retreat but not before wrecking the harbor facilities. It wasn’t clear who commanded whom. Orders went unanswered. As so often happened in the Japanese armed forces, middle-ranking officers took things into their own hands and the most zealous prevailed. By the time a furious Yamashita insisted once again on their retreat, the soldiers and sailors were stuck in Manila with no way out but death.

  Yamashita certainly didn’t face a fair trial. The judges were military desk officers whose knowledge of the law was as scanty as their understanding of battlefield conditions. One of them was so bored that he spent much of the time in deep slumber. MacArthur put all necessary resources at the disposal of the prosecution, whereas the defense lawyers were picked at the last possible minute. There was no time to investigate the more than sixty criminal charges, and even more were added just before the trial began. Rules of evidence and other procedures seemed to be arbitrary, if not rigged. In a “special proclamation” from MacArthur, the rules established by the Allies in June were restated: “The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and non-technical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value. All purported admissions or statements of the accused are admissible.”16

  Alas for Yamashita, this included dubious affidavits as well as statements by a shady couple of former collaborators who tried to cleanse their reputations by subjecting the court to wild allegations of the Japanese general’s alleged plans to exterminate the entire Filipino people. There was also a succession of traumatized witnesses who told their stories about horrific violence during the sacking of Manila. In the words of the Yank report: “Sobbing girl witnesses told of repeated attacks by Jap soldiers. Many of the girls said they were forced to submit at bayonet point . . . An extract of the testimony: ‘. . . A 12-year old was lying on a mat on the floor. She was covered with blood and the mat where she was lying was saturated with blood.’”

  Again, few doubted the truth of such stories. The question was whether Yamashita could have known about them, and even then, could have done anything to stop the violence. At the Nuremberg trials, which were taking place at that same time, German generals were prosecuted only for war crimes which they ordered, abetted, or personally participated in. There was no proof of Yamashita’s having done any of these things. Indeed, his orders pointed in the opposite direction. And so he was charged with a crime that had not existed before, namely, of not being able to stop atrocities committed by troops over whom he had no control and who deliberately went against his orders. Yank stated with confidence that Yamashita had been treated fairly “according to law.” If so, it was no law that Yamashita, or any other military commander, had been even remotely aware of. On December 7, 1945, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Yamashita Tomoyuki was sentenced to death by hanging. He bowed to his judges and thanked the United States for giving him the benefit of “upright American officers and gentlemen as defense counsel.” Major Robert Kerr told a newspaper reporter that he had come to the Pacific expecting to shoot Japs on the beaches, not to hang them, but that it was all the same to him.17

  An appeal for mercy was turned down by MacArthur. Yamashita’s lawyers tried, without much hope, to get the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the trial invalid. Their claim was that military commissions had no right to try former enemies in peacetime, and that the trial had not been conducted fairly. The Supreme Court decided not to contest the legitimacy of the military court, but two justices were highly critical of the trial. In the dissenting words of one of them, Justice Wiley B. Rutledge Jr.: “It is not in our tradition for anyone to be charged with crime which is defined after his conduct . . . Mass guilt we do not impute to individuals, perhaps in any case but certainly in none where the person is not charged or shown actively to have participated in or knowingly to have failed in taking action to prevent the wrongs done by others, having both the duty and the power to do so.”18

  Yamashita declared that his conscience was clear. The evidence of the Manila Massacre, of which he claimed to have been ignorant when it occurred, had shocked him profoundly. He told his lawyers that it would have been hard for him to return to Japan anyway after leaving so many dead men behind. After hearing his sentence, he wrote a short poem:

  The world I knew is now a shameful place

  There will never come a better time

  For me to die.19

  Yamashita was hanged on February 23, 1946, at Los Baños, a picturesque hot spring resort south of Manila.

  • • •

  GENERAL
MACARTHUR HAD a peculiar and interesting justification for his implacability in the case of his Japanese adversary. Yamashita, in his view, had brought dishonor to the military profession.

  The traditions of the fighting men are long and honorable. They are based on the noblest of human traits—sacrifice. This officer . . . has failed this irrevocable standard; has failed his duty to his troops, to his country, to his enemy, to mankind; has failed utterly his soldierly faith. The transgressions resulting therefrom as revealed by the trial are a blot upon the military profession, a stain upon civilization and constitute a memory of shame and dishonor that can never be forgotten.20

  In his grandiose way, MacArthur was voicing a common sentiment of his time: the trials against the German and Japanese war criminals, as well as their accomplices, were not just about restoring the rule of law, but about restoring “civilization.” This was the language of prosecutors in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials as well. It was typical of MacArthur to equate civilization with “soldierly faith.” The idea of conducting trials to blot out the “memory of shame and dishonor,” on the other hand, was most important in countries humiliated by foreign occupation. Perhaps MacArthur was thinking of the Philippines. But that memory was like a shadow everywhere hanging over trials of national leaders who had collaborated with the occupiers, even when they had done so for what were in their own minds honorable reasons.

  One thing Pierre Laval, the highest-ranking minister in two Vichy governments, and Anton Mussert, “the Leader” of the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB), had in common was that they saw themselves as honorable men, patriots who had done everything in their power to serve the interests of their countries. They faced their executioners, after being swiftly tried for treason in the fall and winter of 1945, convinced that they were dying as martyrs and would one day be not only vindicated but recognized as saviors. The other thing they had in common was that they died as the most hated men in their respective nations. There were worse, more brutal people. Neither Laval nor Mussert had a taste for violence. On the contrary, Laval had been a left-wing pacifist during World War I and never lost his personal loathing for military action, even, some would argue, in defense of his nation. He was a born appeaser, confident that he could outwit even the devil in negotiations. As he told his lawyer: “To collaborate to me meant to negotiate.”21 Both men, in fact, had stood up to the Germans on occasion to defend the interests of some of their compatriots, usually without much success. And yet they were almost universally loathed. Which is why the outcome of their trials had to be a foregone conclusion.

  Laval and Mussert, like Yamashita Tomoyuki, were physically unprepossessing, which can’t have helped. Mussert was a pudgy, round-faced little man so utterly unsuited to the black uniforms and leather coats of his fascist party that he always managed to look ridiculous. Laval, never a booted and uniformed rabble-rouser, but a professional politician in striped trousers and a habitual white necktie, had the air of a disreputable merchant of questionable goods: short, dark, greasy-haired, with hooded eyes and a perpetual cigarette staining his crooked teeth and bushy moustache. Mussert started his professional life as an engineer (he designed autobahns, among other things), and Laval as a lawyer. Laval was by far the more successful politician. He led the French government twice before the war and in 1931 was Time magazine’s Man of the Year—“calm, magisterial and popular”—for shepherding France through the Great Depression.22 Mussert was already somewhat of a figure of fun to most Dutch people at the end of the 1930s; strutting around in black shirts was not the Dutch style.

  Neither man wished for a German invasion of his country; they were nationalists, after all. In Laval’s Man of the Year profile, Time magazine actually praised him for being tough on Germany. He made a short-lived pact, in 1935, with Britain and Italy, to stop German rearmament. Anything to avoid another war. Yet, when it happened, both Mussert and Laval saw German occupation as an opportunity, as though their finest hour had finally come. Mussert had visions of a new Europe, dominated by “Germanic peoples,” led by Hitler, to be sure, but with an autonomous National Socialist Netherlands under the leadership of Mussert himself. Fascist idealism held no attraction for Laval. But after having spent the last years of the 1930s in the political wilderness, he saw a role for himself as France’s savior in difficult times. With the old Marshal Pétain as the patriarchal figurehead, Laval would negotiate the best terms he could for France. More than that: he, too, saw possibilities in the new Europe, with France as Germany’s chief ally in purging the continent of that twin modern scourge: Anglo-Jewish capital and Russian bolshevism. As he said in a radio speech in 1942, in words that would come back to haunt him three years later: “I desire the victory of Germany, for without it, bolshevism would tomorrow install itself everywhere.”23

  Before the war, neither Mussert nor Laval had shown any evidence of a personal animosity towards Jews. Mussert had few close friends, but one of the few happened to be Jewish, and in the 1930s he encouraged Jews to become members of his movement. There were “good Jews,” in his thinking, and “bad Jews.” The bad ones were Jews who refused to join him, or criticized the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB), and were thus “un-Dutch.” Unfortunately, Mussert’s German comrades had more rigorous views on the matter, which was one of several issues of contention between him and the German SS. In 1940, he was obliged to expel the few remaining Jewish members from the NSB. For this, Mussert claimed deep regret. How deep is not clear, since he did develop a detailed plan in 1938 to move European Jews to Dutch, French, and British Guiana, a scheme that failed to interest either Himmler or Hitler. (What the British and French thought is unrecorded.) And Mussert had no scruples about enriching himself, as well as his friends and relatives, from robbed Jewish properties.24

  Laval never shared the strong anti-Semitism of the French far right. He, too, had Jewish friends and worked closely with Jewish colleagues. Yet he was minister of state in 1940 when, unprompted by the Germans, the Vichy French statut des juifs (statute on Jews) deprived Jews of their civil rights. He later tried to save French-born Jews from deportation, but only at the price of delivering tens of thousands of foreign-born Jews into the maw of the Third Reich. This included naturalized French citizens who were deprived of their citizenship during the war.

  By setting themselves up as saviors through collaboration, vainglorious figures like Mussert and Laval walked straight into a trap the Germans had laid for them, Mussert from a mixture of ideological delusion and vanity, and Laval from being morally obtuse and putting too much stock in his own cleverness. Neither of them realized that his nationalist illusions—France and the Netherlands as significant partners in the new Europe—hardly fit German plans for total domination. These patriotic quislings were useful to the Germans, as long as they took the heat for unpopular, indeed criminal, German enterprises. Bit by bit, they gave in, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes carelessly. Mussert incorporated his storm troopers into the German SS and swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler, who was, in Mussert’s cloudy imagination, the Führer not just of Germany but of all the “Germanic peoples.” Laval collaborated not only by handing over French workers to German industry in exchange for some French POWs, but also by establishing a militia against French partisans and sending large numbers of Jews to their deaths. It was Laval, not the Germans, who insisted that Jewish children should be deported to Poland with the adults in July 1942, ostensibly to keep families together.

  As a result of their behavior, both men were despised and distrusted by the Germans as “bourgeois nationalists” and detested by their own countrymen as the embodiments of everything that was sordid and shameful about the occupation. They were hated even by the most ardently pro-German Nazis in their own countries, the kind of people who enthusiastically worked for Hitler’s Reich. Since Mussert and Laval had so few people on their side, after Liberation they were the perfect candidates for trials and punishment. Making examples of the two most co
nspicuous faces of collaboration made millions who had not shown conspicuous courage themselves feel better.

  Pétain was tried and sentenced to death as well, but age and distinction saved him. His trial was never part of de Gaulle’s plans. The general would have much preferred for the old man to have stayed in Swiss exile. Pétain had requested the trial himself. If this proved to be an embarrassment, the French certainly could not bring themselves to shoot the hero of Verdun. So he was banished instead. Laval, in a sense, took his place as an object of blame. In the words of a popular French ditty of the time: “Pétain, to sleep / Laval to the stake / de Gaulle to work.” Time magazine, the very same journal that had praised Laval so effusively more than a decade before, wrote:

  Last week Pierre Laval came to judgment. With him came none of the dreadful pity, the sense of terrible duty that had been in every Frenchman’s heart during the trial, sentence and commutation to life imprisonment of old Marshal Pétain. The elimination of Pierre Laval, a necessary chore, might have been a satisfying vengeance. He made it a shameful farce.25

  This was a trifle unfair. The trial was a farce, to be sure, but Laval was not the main culprit. De Gaulle did not like the business of purges and trials, but had to get to work, as the ditty demanded, and wanted this one to be over with as quickly as possible. A referendum on the postwar constitution was scheduled for October 21, so Laval’s verdict had to be in by then. Laval sat in his prison cell, smoking five packets of American cigarettes a day, fuming because he was denied access to the documents he had carefully accumulated for his defense. A note retrieved from his suitcase when he was flown back to France from his temporary refuge in Germany revealed his bitter state of mind: “It is a strange paradox. Here I am, obliged to justify myself before a court for policies and conduct which should have earned me the recognition of my country. Both before the war, and during those unhappy years of occupation, I know I fulfilled my duty.”26