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  • Killer in Manila?
  • Kendrick Oliver (bio)
Allan A. Ryan . Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice, and Command Accountability. Lawrence : University Press of Kansas , 2012 . xxiv + 381 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 .

On September 2, 1945, eighteen days after Emperor Hirohito had announced his country’s unconditional surrender, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, commander of the Japanese army in the Philippines, emerged from his mountain headquarters to arrange the official cessation of hostilities between his forces and the Americans. He was immediately taken into U.S. military custody. Arriving in the city of Baguio for the formal ritual of surrender, Yamashita handed over his ceremonial sword and asked: when would he be executed?

Yamashita believed that his fate was sealed, and—as Allan Ryan’s study indicates—so it probably was. The general’s passage to the gallows took longer than he expected: close to six months, including five weeks of trial by U.S. military commission and a surprising detour of his case through the U.S. Supreme Court. Assisted by diligent and able counsel and afforded the opportunity to publically explain his role in the Philippines campaign, he may even have come to nurture a hope of exoneration; but, in retrospect, the outcome seems close to inevitable. General MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, wanted Yamashita dead; the military commission was subservient to MacArthur’s desires, and a tradition of deference to military autonomy made the Supreme Court reluctant to intercede with any force on Yamashita’s behalf. Was the travesty of judicial procedure through which Yamashita was steered before he met his end nevertheless preferable to a swift summary execution—that is, to no procedure at all? The question is invited, though not directly answered, by Ryan’s account, which describes not just the trial but also its toxic legacy. It introduced into U.S. and international law a concept of command responsibility so ambiguously and expansively phrased that it seemed to declare commanders criminally accountable for any misdeeds committed by their men. The result—with respect to the conduct of American military justice—was an ever-lengthening hypocrisy, for subsequently few U.S. commanders have been indicted and fewer still convicted on the basis of the Yamashita precedent. In international legal settings, the [End Page 485] Yamashita standard has been the subject of so much parsing and refinement that the general himself could not have been found guilty under its present terms. Ryan, indeed, questions whether a coherent, enforceable principle of command accountability—as distinct from older concepts of dereliction of the duty of command—is really possible or necessary. His book, then, embodies a third mode of response: explicit, reasoned disavowal.

According to Ryan, Yamashita’s Ghost is “the first book written by a lawyer with reference to the 4,000 page transcript of the trial” (p. xv). In the phrase “by a lawyer” lies his work’s primary claim to originality and value. The trial transcript has been quite extensively referenced in at least one previous scholarly account—historian Richard L. Lael’s The Yamashita Precedent: War Crimes and Command Responsibility (1982), which drew widely from other archival materials as well. The two books share many of the same plot points and conclude similarly, in common with a lot of other observers at the time of the trial and since, that Yamashita was the victim of very rough justice.

The historical case—elaborated by Lael and reprised by Ryan—for regarding Yamashita with sympathy is hard to contest. The general was not an advocate of war against the United States. When the war came, his talents as a commander resulted in the rout of British forces in Malaya and the fall of Singapore, but they also ensured that these victories were not attended by slaughter. His troops remained disciplined; for as long as he was in command, they treated British and Australian prisoners of war decently. Some Japanese units did perpetrate atrocities during the Malaya campaign, but a British interrogator who interviewed Yamashita in October 1945 was convinced by the general’s claim that he had been unaware of such crimes.

In October 1944, following a two-year sojourn patrolling...

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