Yamashita's Ghost:War Crimes, MacArthur's Justice, and Command Accountability by Allan A. Ryan (review)

Yamashita's Ghost is an impressive contribution to the literature of military justice and command. Tomoyuki Yamashita, Japanese commander in the Philippines during the American invasion of 1944/45, was the first Axis military leader to be tried after World War II. Acting almost entirely on his self-defined authority, Gen. Douglas MacArthur convened the court, drew up the charges, selected the commissioners (general officers devoid of legal education), determined the rules of evidence (allowing hearsay testimony), and in many other ways influenced (or more accurately, corrupted) the proceedings. MacArthur's primary allegation was that Yamashita had failed to control his troops and was thus responsible for their misbehavior. Much of the prosecution's case was devoted to detailing the "rape of Manila"—in which, despite Yamashita's orders to withdraw, Japanese naval forces ran amok, slaughtering thousands of noncombatants.

Despite days of testimony, no evidence then or since has proved that Yamashita ordered, tolerated, or even knew about these atrocities. Moreover, it was made manifestly clear that MacArthur's campaign had destroyed Yamashita's ability to control his forces. But, in an unprecedented decision (never duplicated before or since), the commissioners determined that Yamashita should have known of his subordinates' war crimes and that his failure to stop them rendered him complicit. Despite an appeal that reached to the U.S. Supreme Court, Yamashita was convicted and hanged. Since then, the "Yamashita standard" has been, in Ryan's felicitous term, a "ghost" that has both clarified and confused the issue of a commander's responsibility for subordinates' actions.

Ryan is a gifted researcher and writer, remarkably judicious in his assessments of the prosecution and the defense. He deftly moves between a riveting account of the trial and a dispassionate analysis of the evidence, legal precedents, and alternative interpretations of the evidence and the commissioners' decisions. No scholar who has read extensively in the MacArthur papers will be surprised that the general was a petty, vindictive hypocrite whose actions in the Yamashita case dishonored both himself and military justice. But this book goes far beyond courtroom drama and historical narrative. With precision and lucidity, Ryan details the complexities of legal precedents on such issues as command responsibility, war crimes, and military commissions. He makes a strong case that the Yamashita standard could have been applied to American senior officers complicit in the My Lai Massacre. He also finds many parallels, both good and bad, with the current war-crimes prosecutions regarding the genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. His final chapter on the law of war and command accountability is an especially brilliant discussion of legal and moral responsibility.